INFORMATION TO USERS

This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMi films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer.

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps.

Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order.

ProQuest Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 UMI

‘FEELS LIKE TIMES HAVE CHANGED”: SIXTIES WESTERN HEROES

DISSERTATION

Presented in I^rtial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of ftilosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Matthew Stephen Wanat, M. A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2001

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Linda Mizejewski, Adviser . Professor Chadwick Allen ^ Adviser Professor Patrick Mullen English Graduate Program UMI Number 3031281

UMI*

UMI Microform 3031281 Copyright 2002 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

Bell & Howell Information and Leaming Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT

The topic of my dissertation is the genre of the western in popular music, film, literature, and television from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. In particular, I focus on the western formula hero as refigured through an era of cultural transition. My project joins an ongoing discussion of how the transformation of popular genres reflects and informs social transformation. Specifically, this dissertation explores the politics of influential artists such as Sam Peckinpah, Bob Dylan, and Elmore Leonard in order to facilitate a closer reading of the relationship between artistic production and sociopolitical contexts in a decade of profound social and political change. Western formula heroes have traditionally protected versions of white, capitalist democracy, saving stage coaches from Indians, saving farmers from land barons, and saving towns from bullies. These heroes have never been without a certain degree of ambivalence, but in 1960s westerns they become increasingly reluctant about the communities their deeds serve, and their reluctance reflects specific sociopolitical issues of the decade. The westerns of this time reveal an awareness of the cultural and political limitations of western heroes, and the reluctance of these heroes also provides a means by which artists, producers, and audiences articulate anxieties about cultural and political alliances at large. Equations of small western towns with a unified notion of American community give way to a world where “community” could mean any number of disparate groups and a world where the hero’s ability or desire to serve a given community is in question. There is a growing body of critical work that approaches westerns through the cultural contexts of their initial date of release, i.e., an approach to the western as “sociopolitical allegory.” However, theories reading genre texts as reflections of their ii sociopolitical moment frequently isolate a single event to which their chosen texts respond, neither accounting for the variety of sociopolitical contexts surrounding the text nor accounting for significant artistic and media-specific trends informing the text’s production. My dissertation proposes an author-based approach as a means of restoring artistic context to the study of the connections between genre and sociopolitical context One of the contributions my study makes to discussions of the western as sociopolitical allegory lies in my attention to how the values and public images of artists contribute to sociopolitical subtext Most interestingly, these artists often self-reflexively foreground their own sociopolitical anxieties alongside those of the heroes in their westerns. I am interested in the possibilities and limitations of these self-reflexive strategies as a means of sociopolitical commentary through a popular geme hero.

m For Jenny, Henry, and Family.

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my adviser Linda Mizejewski for her hard work and support, both on the dissertation and throughout my graduate experience. I am also grateful to Chad Allen and Pat Mullen for their kind words and many thoughtful suggestions. Additionally, this dissertation was made possible with a little help from my friends: John Roberts, Jessica Prinz, Mike Smrtic, Richard Hood, Jeremy Aufrance, Jenny Wanat, and an inordinate number of talented students. Finally, I am grateful to the Museum of Television and Radio for their collection and assistance, and I would like to thank the English Department at Ohio State for fellowships, teaching and administrative experiences, scholarly support, and spirited conversations always. VITA

January 20, 1973 ...... Bom - Wooster, Ohio 1995 ...... B.A. English and Education, Denison University 1995 - 1996 ...... University Fellow, The Ohio State University 1996 - 1997 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University 199 7 ...... M.A. English, The Ohio State University 1997-1998 ...... Graduate Administrative Associate, The Ohio State University 1998-2001 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS Page A bstract ...... ii Dedication...... iv t Acknowledgments ...... v V ita ...... vi Chapters: 1. Introduction ...... 1 2. Equalizers and Outcasts: From “Problem Plot” to Reluctant Hero ...... 47 3. Muchos Hombres: Observations on the Elmore Leonard Hero ...... 71 4. “Never Stopped Searching”: Politics and the Peckinpah H ero...... I ll 5. “Let’s Go”: Commitment, Gender, and Mexico in The Wild Bunch ...... 155

6. “Drifter’s Escape”: Bob Dylan’s Western Heroes ...... 199 7. “Romance in Durango”: Collaboration and the Counterculture Western ...... 260 Bibliography ...... 301

vu CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Frederick Jackson Turner, in his 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” writes, “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier” (2). Turner’s essay helped initiate a critical debate on the value of the West to American national identity. Today the gerue of the western remains a key element of this debate. Westerns reflect and inform social and political values, and the relationship between the genre and America’s sociopolitical climate is particularly interesting in the 1960s, a time of upheaval and possibility. This dissertation focuses on the genre of the western in popular music, film, literature, and television from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. In particular, this project characterizes the western hero as refigured through an era of cultural transition. The 1960s can be historicized as the Vietnam era, the Civil Rights era, or an era of multiple revolutions surrounding class, gender, race, sexual orientation, and generational conflict. My project reads 1960s western heroes as responses to the period’s rapid change. Western heroes have traditionally protected versions of white, capitalist democracy, saving stage coaches from Indians, saving farmers from land barons, and saving towns from bullies. These heroes have never been without a certain degree of ambivalence, but in 1960s westerns they become increasingly reluctant about the communities their deeds serve, and their reluctance reflects sociopolitical issues of the decade. The westerns of this time reveal an awareness of the cultural and political limitations of western heroes, and the reluctance of these heroes provides a means by which artists, producers, and audiences articulate anxieties about cultural and political alliances at large. Equations of small western towns with a unified notion of American community give way to a world where "community" could mean any number of disparate groups and a world where a hero’s desire to serve a given community is in question. The following chapters explore variations in popular artists’ treatments of reluctant and evasive western heroes. I have organized Chapters Three through Seven of the dissertation around three artists from different media who are significant to broader social, political, and artistic transformations in the 1960s and the western. One of these artists, Sam Peckinpah, has long been at the center of critical discussions of the film western. The other two artists, writer Elmore Leonard and music icon Bob Dylan, have been neglected by critics in terms of their contributions to the western, but their engagements with the western hero in social and political terms make them exemplars of 1960s anxieties about the sociopolitical possibilities and limitations of the geme. Elmore Leonard’s western short stories and novels, Sam Peckinpah’s films, and Bob Dylan’s music exemplify heroes at odds with the demands and results of heroism. Theirs are heroes whose reluctance to serve various models of community, dominant or revolutionary, speak to the anxieties of their creators and also to the anxieties of an era. This dissertation proposes an author-based approach to emphasize how artists’ anxieties mediate and inform connections between genre and sociopolitical context. By returning to the issue of artistic production, I seek to strengthen connections other critics have made between geme texts and their cultural climates. My reading of 1960s westerns uses a variation on the “sociopolitical/allegorical’’ approach to the western, but with important differences from other studies of this sort. Theories reading geme texts as reflections of their sociopolitical moment, i.e., as “allegories” of their time, frequently isolate a single event to which their chosen texts respond, neither accounting for the variety of sociopolitical contexts surrounding the texts nor accounting for significant artistic and media-specific trends informing the texts’ production. Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation (1992) and Michael Coyne’s The Crowded Prairie (1997) are two of the most thorough examples of the “allegory” approach. Both critics deal extensively with film westerns of the 1960s in the context of the Kennedy era and the Vietnam War, each noting Kennedy’s rhetorical use of frontier imagery in his famous quest for the “new frontier” and 2 each also reading specific westerns of the era as increasingly “Vietnamized” endeavors. However, both of these texts, by the breadth of their historical scope, finally cannot explore the variety of contexts, both artistic and sociopolitical, informing the construction of westerns in this period. Rarely do the westerns of the 1960s comment exclusively on one sociopolitical issue. More often, 1960s westerns explore myriad contexts simultaneously, including Civil Rights, women’s liberation movements, and the progressive politics of the left in general. Furthermore, some of the most interesting sociopolitical commentary in the era’s westerns is deliberately nonspecific in terms of sociopolitical contexts, concentrating more on self-reflexively critiquing the relationship between the conventional western hero and contentious sociopolitical forces than on any single event of the decade itself. These westerns self-reflexively foreground conventions and/or the persona of the artist as a means of centering the genre, its heroes, and artistic production itself in a world of politicized interests. It is significant that in the 1960s the majority of those creating westerns and the heroes driving the genre are still largely white and male, for many of the westerns of the period self-consciously and often only halfheartedly reflect a critique of white masculinity influenced by the progressive politics of the 1960s left. An author-based approach offers a means of exploring the ways in which the western hero, the conventions of the western, and the western artist are self-reflexively intertwined in 1960s genre texts, where hero, conventions, and artist are foregrounded as inadequate models for changing times. Nevertheless, an author-based theory must be approached with caution insofar as such theories tend to treat genre as raw material for authorial innovation. For example, in discussing literary metafiction, Scott Emmert’s “Metafiction and Parody” (1996) notes that “authors who build into their narratives an awareness of the artificiality of their narrative form... reveal their belief that literary conventions must change to usher in not only new modes of storytelling, but ‘new, more perceptible’ ideas as well” (109-110). Building on Patricia Waugh’s discussion of metafiction, Emmett reads texts like Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times (1960) as “parodying narrative conventions” and “exposing the cultural assumptions which underlie these conventions” (110). This reading of the era’s metafiction combines an interest in generic transformation with an interest in social

3 transformation. However, despite a stated emphasis on the socially transformative possibilities of metafiction, Emmert’s literary theories, like the auteur film theories of Jean- Loup Bourget (1973) and Jim Kitses (1969), risk attributing generic change to individual genius at the expense of illustrating the ways in which broader cultural and artistic contexts inform popular genre texts. Postmodern metafiction like Welcome to Hard Times. Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969), Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billv the Kid (1970), and Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger (1968-1975) are self-consciously literary attempts to distance their authors from the formulaic absurdities and political conservatism of the conventional western. But these works are actually exaggerated instances of anxieties about the western hero that occur regularly in television westerns, fiction by formulaic writers like Elmore Leonard, popular film westerns, and western songs in the era at large. For this reason, I have decided to save the most self-consciously postmodern texts for future projects in favor of more popular western fare in order to illustrate that self-conscious explorations of the sociopolitics of the western occur in venues other than those dominated by 1960s academics and the literary elite. Furthermore, Emmert’s association of self-consciousness with “new modes of storytelling, [and] ‘new, more perceptible’ ideas as well” begs further debate. My dissertation concurs that there is a great deal of self-consciousness about the sociopolitical limitations of the western hero in the 1960s, particularly surrounding the hero’s conventional associations with white patriarchy, either as servant of white patriarchy (e.g., in Leonard’s Hombrel or as white, male hero stmggling to reconcile diverse race and gender interests (e.g., in the work of Peckinpah and Dylan). However, this self- consciousness mode of storytelling leads not necessarily to more diverse heroes and plots so much as to a bind for white, male authors and 1960s white patriarchy at large, wherein the era’s westerns self-consciously explore the limitations of the conventional western hero for mediating progressive political change but fail to imagine optimistic generic possibilities for an era of greater diversity. My methodology intervenes between approaches to the western as sociopolitical allegory and author-based approaches to the genre. My approach is best described as “synthetic criticism.” Film scholar Robin Wood’s “Ideology, Genre, Auteur” (1977) uses this term to describe a combined criticism where each theory “can offer insights into different areas of cinema and different aspects of a single film” (475). Wood offers synthetic criticism as a means of salvaging some of the advantages of auteur theory for politically minded theorists. His essay, by finally seeming to subordinate both genre and ideology to auteurs like Hitchcock, begins to reveal some of its own limitations. Nonetheless, Wood’s emphasis on auteurism at the expense of ideology and genre strikes me as an error of application more than an error of method. The present is a fmitful time for a synthetic study of geme because the study of genre through cultural contexts seems at a stage where we can speak more carefully about the relationship between generic transformation and the sociopolitical milieu of a genre text’s production. There is some value in noting the coincidence of texts and events, for example, news reports on the My Lai massacre and massacre scenes in The Wild Bunch (1969) or, for another example, Kennedy’s foreign policy and the interventionist ideology of The Magnificent Seven (1960). However, a synthetic study combining an author-based approach with an allegorical approach is prudent for the direct connections it can make between production of geme texts and their sociopolitical climate. One of the contributions my study makes to discussions of the western as sociopolitical allegory lies in a more specific description of how the values and public images of artists contribute to sociopolitical subtext. In addition to articulating connections between artists and sociopolitical content, the following study also explores the western across various media. This multimedia emphasis contributes to the body of work on the western as sociopolitical allegory in a number of ways. First, a multimedia approach lends greater breadth to our knowledge of 1960s westerns by including media often neglected in studies of genre: music and television. Secondly, a multimedia approach lends greater depth to our knowledge of sociopolitical subtext by acknowledging the influence of media-specific trends on production. For example, a knowledge of the leftist orientation of the “urban folk music revival” illuminates the sociopolitical subtext of Bob Dylan’s western songs. Lastly, a 5 multimedia approach to the western in the 1960s recognizes that influence reaches across media: Sam Peckinpah started in television. Bob Dylan acted in films, Elmore Leonard drew inspiration from films, and the relationships between television, literature, film, and music are often intertwined. The material analyzed in my study is what might be accurately termed “the twentieth-century formula western,” what Loren D. Estleman (1987) calls “the Wister trace” in acknowledgement of a creative and commercial watershed commonly cited in such studies, Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902).^ Some studies differentiate between the terms “formula” and “genre” in order to avoid the general confusion as to what “gerue” means. Since the word “genre” sometimes refers to modes of written or verbal communication like poetry, fiction, nonfiction, debate, and address, some critics have seen fit to discuss bodies of conventional standards associated with specific types of narrative as “formulas” instead of as “genres.” The formula approach, in addition to avoiding unwanted connotations of the term “geme,” also has allowed critics to stress the processes of standardization, escapism, and the academy’s frequently elitist response to story types like the western. John Cawelti (1976), for example, writes, “Two central aspects of formulaic structures have been generally condemned in the serious artistic thought of the last hundred years: their essential standardization and their primary relation to the needs of escape and relaxation” (8). For my purposes, the term “formula western” is used simply to differentiate westerns with stock western settings, scenarios, and heroes from a diverse body of artistic works on the American west. American Indian oral and written literatures and arts, craftworks, nature writing and ecocriticism, autobiography and memoir, history, painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, theory, and other western artistic productions all intersect with each other and with the formula western at moments in cultural history, but these productions are

1 The Virginian, like Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), is not solely the product of invention but rather synthesis; Wister’s novel synthesizes a number of now-typical conventions from previous sources, including Cooper, Bret Harte, the “dime novel,” and Stephen Crane. These conventions include the hero who stands out among other men, the tension between east and west, the tension between female values and male values, the honorable use of violence, etcetera. Dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt and illustrated by Frederick Remington, the novel helped the President and the famous western painter model both western and masculine values for the “strenuous age” when immigration and industrialization were treated as crises for white masculinity. 6 themselves distinct versions of the western beyond the scope of this study. Therefore, by “formula” I mean conventional scenarios, most often revolving around the action of a western hero. The formula westerns to which I refer have been long standardized, but I am not interested here in making claims about the whole, clumsy body of formulaic westerns, even in a single decade. Moreover, the “escapism” I locate in 1960s westerns is not defined so much as producers’ and consumers’ outright avoidance of sociopolitical issues but rather as reluctance on the part of western artists to imagine formula heroes compatible with various forms of sociopolitical change. The remainder of this introduction charts the critical trail left by previous explorations of the western. Since no critical work can pioneer new territory without first surveying the paths left by other critics, my survey of previous criticism pays particular attention to those critical signposts most useful for the study of the western in its sociopolitical context. The introduction culminates in a discussion of the dissertation’s relationship to these previous critical signposts and a summary of the goals for each chapter.

SURVEYING THE CRITICAL TRAIL

The conventions of the American western begin in the larger idea of “the American frontier,” a broad term for the edge of white civilization or the outermost reach of European Americans into “the wilderness.” The “frontier” and the “wilderness” as concepts lie at the heart of American culture and arts, informing and reflecting transformations in family, politics, religion, commerce, and philosophy as well as transformations in written literatures, oral culture, painting, music, theater, journalism, photography, radio, film, and television. As such pervasive concepts, “frontier” and “wilderness” influence major genres of American artistic production: captivity narratives beginning with the popularity of the tale of Mary Rowlandson (1682); the ‘Leather-Stocking” historical romances of James Fenimore Cooper (1823-1841); romantic interests in nature most popularized by the transcendental philosophers and poets; oral tall tales and their literary descendants from

7 Thomas Bangs Thorpe to Samuel Clemens; the dime novel; local color, the emergence of realism; and many more. Long before there were films actually called “westerns,” there were frontier characters and conventions informing the emergence of film narrative. And long before there was such a thing as the literary “western,” there were characters and conventions in American folk and popular arts that would later form the backbone of the western as a genre. Therefore, the clever critic, polemical historian, or ornery observer of American arts might locate the origin of the western’s critical trail at almost any point in the history of American discourse when someone has commented upon the frontier as convention. For the sake of sanity, however, most critics of the western choose familiar pioneers, e.g., Frederick Jackson Turner, and familiar temporal sign posts, e.g., 1893, for the origins of their own critical trail. Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) is a significant gateway to the western’s critical trail. Turner’s thesis is a theoretical gateway to the West, a passage to many twentieth-century discussions of the material and symbolic importance of all things west of the Mississippi. According to Ray Allen Billington, Turner’s “frontier hypothesis,” delivered to the American Historical Association after the the 1890 census declared the western frontier closed, was intended as a rebellion “against both the current concept of history as past politics and the ‘germ theory’ that traced all institutions to their origins in the forests of medieval Germany" (vii). As Billington argues. Turner’s “then-startling thesis” was “that the differences between American and European civilization could be explained by the unique environment of the New World.” Therefore, Turner’s thesis was immediately intended not as a tool for textual analysis but rather as a theory of American history, and a controversial and continually contested theory at that.2 But Turner’s idea that “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier” has been mobilized beyond its original

^ Gerald Nash (1993) points out that Patrick Porter, the superintendent of the 1890 census on whom Turner relied, was in error. Turner contemporary Isaiah Bowman refuted Porter’s claims that the frontier was closed. In fact, Nash notes, “between 1905 and 1915 more than 500,000 Americans participated in a land rush to tlie western Canadian provinces” (19). Among other Tumerian theories challenged by historians is Turner’s evolutionary notion that civilization is reborn on the frontier in stages culminating in the rise of cities. Richard C. Wade’s The Urban Frontier The Rise of Western Cities. 1790-1830 (1959) was one early refutation of Turner’s stages; Wade argues that city planning often came before settlement rather than, as Turner claimed, grew from it. 8 interest in the economic development and historical self-definition provided by the existence of western lands. In fact. Turner’s thesis has had a major influence on the strategies of textual analysis deployed throughout the canon of American Studies. Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), Roy Harvey Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization (1953), Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), Annette Kolodny’s The Lav of the Land (1975), and Richard Slotkin’s frontier trilogy. Regeneration Through Violence (1973), The Fatal Environment (1985), and Gunfighter Nation (1992), all build on Turner’s thesis. Turner’s significance to these studies of fi'ontier literature and the western lies in his introduction of the frontier as an influential symbol and myth in the American mind. Smith’s Virgin Land: American West as Symbol and Mvth (1950), for example, uses the the idea of the West’s symbolic and mythical value to explore both the history of westward expansion and its documentation in texts ranging from Cooper’s “Leather-Stocking Tales” to the Beadle “dime novels” and beyond. Kolodny’s The Lav of the Land (19751 another example that explores the symbolic and mythical power of the frontier, is a foundational piece of feminist scholarship combining literary textual analysis with a reading of the history of colonization, westward expansion, and land exploitation as facilitated by a feminization of natural space. In both of these examples, frontier is most important symbolically and mythically, though in both examples the symbolic and mythic dimension of the frontier has material consequences for American cultural identity. Most of the aforementioned masterpieces of American Studies focus on texts prior to the twentieth century—Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation (1992) is an important exception. While my project deals with later texts than those explored in the bulk of the aforementioned critical works, I mention the tradition of criticism on the image of the frontier because this body of scholarship establishes many of the critical conventions used to discuss film and literary westerns of the twentieth century. Significantly, the binary oppositions that one finds in many of the aforementioned studies—e.g., east and west, female and male, civilization and savagery, law and outlawry, settlement and wilderness. society and individual—still operate in our discussions of the formula western, and were significant in earlier discussions thereof. Moreover, the symbolic and mythic value of frontier imagery has always been a feature of the criticism on the western. Discussions of the formula western emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, when the disciplines of film studies, popular culture studies, and cultural studies were still in their infancy. An important critical reading of the film western, Robert Warshow’s “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner” (1954), exemplifies early concerns in the scholarship. In his foundational essay, Warshow describes changes that were no doubt shaking his sense of the film western in the 1950s. These transformations led Gary Cooper from the bitter- sweat victory of the western “code” in the film The Virginian (1929) to the “material bareness, the pressures of obligation” in the westerner’s midlife crisis High Noon (1952) (459). Warshow writes, “As lines of age have come into Gary Cooper’s face since The Virginian, so the outlines of the Western movie in general have become less smooth, its background more drab.” “Even the horses,” he adds, are “no longer the ‘friends’ of man or the inspired chargers of knights-errantry” they once were. Here, Warshow explores the western through the lens of two critical interests common in early studies of the western: (1) concern with the evolution of the genre; (2) the location of the ori^ns of the genre in far older conventional formulae like medieval tales of “knights-errantry.” Warshow frames his discussion of the western in evolutionary terms and in terms of older, more established heroic stories. He also passes value judgments. Warshow embraces the “more drab” west, but only to a degree. Describing the The Gunfighter (1950), a story about a badman cursed by his life of violence and inevitably killed by a violent upstart, Warshow admires the film’s aesthetic pose of “authenticity,” i.e., its quality of nineteenth-century photography. Neither “real” nor excessively stylized, “The Gunfighter can permit us to feel that we are looking at a more ‘real’ West than the one the movies have accustomed us to—harder, duller, less ‘romantic’—and yet without forcing us outside the boundaries which give the Western movie its validity.” It appears, then, that

10 Warshow’s comfort with the “drab,” the “real,” and the “authentic” qualities of The Gunfighter is contingent upon a degree of aestheticization. In fact, the particular brand of realism Warshow seeks must place social reality at a distance: But when the impulse toward realism is extended into a “reinterpretation” of the West as a developed society, drawing our eyes away from the hero if only to the extent of showing him as the one dominant figure in a complex social order, then the pattern is broken and the West itself begins to be uninteresting. (461) Warshow’s essay on the state of the western in 1954 is less a description than a prescription. He prescribes that a text is a western by virtue of the hero at the center and that too much social reality is bad for the genre. Warshow’s warning against “reinterpretation” represents an opposition to “social drama” westerns. He opposes those westerns that work at the site of social relevance at the expense of eroding what he believes is the genre’s foundation: the individual hero with his code of what a man “has to do” (457). Warshow takes to task The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and High Noon (1952) for their overbearing “social drama,” i.e., the former film’s anti-lynching message and the latter’s interrogation of the “cowardice, malice, irresponsibility, or venality” of the town (462). In The Ox-Bow Incident the social drama of execution “makes the Western setting irrelevant.” In High Noon, where the townspeople refuse to help the former marshal fight the same bad men from whom he once saved the town, the social drama ends in the society’s rejection of the “man of virtue” (462- 463). High Noon, according to Warshow, leaves the hero with no generic purpose when the town refuses to acknowledge the virtue of his actions. Therefore, it is not so much that Warshow is arguing, along with the oft-quoted line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”; rather, Warshow is interested in the westerner as a hero who transcends facts to begin with. Warshow focuses on the western’s conventions, particularly the conventions of the western hero, and how these conventions distinguish the western from other genres. Whereas the gangster is circumscribed by social reality, a slave to money, corruption, and modem social turmoil, “The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies which over and over again tell his story are probably the last art form in which the concept of honor retains its strength” (457). 11 Through his interest in the generic conventions of the western, Warshow helps establish a few more conventions of criticism on the western as well:

(3) prescription of clear boundaries wherein texts must operate to remain adequately representative of the genre; (4) the argument that the western, like many gemes, is defined by stock characters and settings that, by functioning within clear boundaries, mark their texts’ membership to the genre; (5) the argument that the western, like many genres, has a social potential, though critics subject this social potential to a diversity of critical definitions and embrace it with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In Warshow’s essay, the social potential can disrupt generic boundaries by becoming socially germane to the point of being somehow un-westem. This fear explains Warshow’s argument that “the war movie may represent a more civilized point of view than the Western, and if it were not continually marred by ideological sentimentality we might hope to find it developing into a higher form of drama” (466). The implication here is that Warshow’s ideal western is a “higher form of drama” for avoiding nondiegetic society and politics. Warshow, like all critics, is a product of his time. The publication of his “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner” is temporally sandwiched between Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theorv of Film: The Redemption of Phvsical Reality (1960), both of which explore film theory’s realism / formalism debate, a debate that film history has traced conveniently to the infancy of the cinema where the Lumiere brother’s “actualities” and Melies’s fantasies helped define the possibilities of a new medium. Therefore, it makes sense that Warshow might situate the proper western somewhere in between “the impulse toward realism” in The Ox-Bow Incident and the “unhappy preoccupation with style” in Stagecoach (1939) or the “highest expression of this aestheticizing tendency” in Shane (1953). Likewise, Warshow’s westerner, by doing what he “has to do” with little regard for social reward, fits nicely into the mid-century category of “existential hero.” Warshow writes, “What ‘redeems’ him is that he no longer believes in this drama and nevertheless will continue to play his role perfectly: the pattern is all” (461). Warshow’s western hero, therefore, becomes a popular generic hero of 12 existentialism on the eve of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1955), heroically pushing the rock for the pattern itself rather than for the reward. Lastly, Warshow’s interest in genre as style over social content, while partly at odds with the realist film theories of Kracauer and André Bazin, is a predictable product of formalist interests in detachment and the primacy of text that dominate a great deal of twentieth-century intellectual thought This critical context explains some of Warshow’s interest in conventions over sociopolitical import. However, interest in conventions aside, I finally fail to believe that Warshow’s westerner is anti-social. Warshow’s fear that “social drama” can irrevocably destabilize a western’s generic status as western is at least partly inconsistent with his claim, “The Westerner is the last gentleman” (457). Admittedly, by “gentleman” Warshow means a “style” of man, but he also means to argue that the westerner’s actions have social merit. If it matters to Warshow that the “man of virtue” in High Noon is rejected by the town, this rejection matters precisely because the code of the western hero models socially desirable behavior. In fact, Warshow finally justifies the violence of the western hero over that of the gangster on the grounds that there are features of the westerner’s persona that are worth emulating: e.g., his ability to act without reward, his refusal to fight if unprovoked, and his adherence to a code in general. Warshow writes, “Watch a child with his toy guns and you will see: what most interests him is not (as we so much fear) the fantasy of hurting others, but to work out how a man might look when he shoots or is shot. A hero is one who looks like a hero” (466). While Warshow emphasizes style over sociopolitical content, his emphasis upon style has clear sociopolitical implications. Warshow suggests that the style of behavior exhibited by the hero, if realistic enough to be plausible but stylized enough to be interesting, will inspire children to emulate the westerner’s values. Therefore, the critic attributes social consequences to style. Moreover, Warshow assumes that part of the western hero’s social impact has to do with his masculinity, wherein children, presumably boys, “work out how a man might look.” Warshow’s celebration of kids with guns now seems irresponsible, since between the original publication of his essay and the time I write this dissertation Americans have seen increasingly graphic violence in literary westerns and film westerns, the anti-war response to Vietnam, a rash of killings in America’s schools, and an increasingly heated 13 debate over firearms legislation. Nevertheless, Warshow’s interest in the social possibilities of the western hero’s style adds two more critical conventions to the aforementioned five: (6) interest in the social potential of the western often translates into or is drawn firom an interest in the social potential of the western hero; (7) masculinity is at the center of definitions of the western hero. The social potential Warshow sees for the western hero of High Noon is that the hero can provide a style of behavior that leaves its mark on the western town, i.e., the diegetic society, and that this style of behavior can also leave its mark on the film audience by the audience’s association with the diegetic society. According to Warshow, High Noon fails because “our final glimpse’’ of the western hero has him riding “away through the town where he has spent most of his life without really imposing himself on it” (463). That the values Warshow prescribes as worthy of emulation are phrased in terms of masculinity shows the limited gender consciousness of Warshow’s critical moment, but Warshow’s disappointment with High Noon may in fact have more to do with gender issues than his assumption of the hero’s masculinity lets on. In retrospect, part of the crisis of High Noon is that the pacifist wife (Grace Kelly) is more eager than any of the men in the town to assist the hero. More appalling from a masculinist perspective is that the hero requires such help to begin with.^ Whatever the contradictions in his argument, Robert Warshow establishes many of the critical conventions one finds in studies of the western, especially in early studies of the genre:

^ In fact, the hero’s impotence in High Noon was appalling enough to inspire Howard Hawk’s Rio Bravo (1959) to have John Wayne’s character refuse help from the town. Hawks and Wayne would have none of the new western possibility, “A woman’s got to help do what a man’s got to do.” 14 (1) concern with the evolution of the genre; (2) the location of the origins of the genre in far older conventional formulae like medieval tales of “knights-errantry”; (3) prescription of clear boundaries wherein texts must operate to remain adequately representative of the genre; (4) the argument that the western, like many geiues, is defined by stock characters and settings that, by functioning within clear boundaries, mark their texts’ membership to the genre; (5) the argument that the western, like many genres, has a social potential, though critics subject this social potential to a diversity of critical definitions and embrace it with varying degrees of enthusiasm; (6) interest in the social potential of the western often translates into or is drawn firom an interest in the social potential of the western hero; (7) masculinity is at the center of definitions of the western hero. These critical conventions inform not only the earliest explorations of the western but also linger in our discussions of the genre today. Therefore, they merit further discussion in terms of their centrality to prior and recent discourse on genre.

GENERIC EVOLUTION:

(1) concern with the evolution of the genre.

The notion that genre evolves was not especially new at the time of Warshow’s foundational essay. Rick Altman, in his recent book Film / Genre (1999), briefly summarizes the history of genre criticism in the western European world in four broad stages: (1) Classical, (2) Neoclassical, (3) Nineteenth-Century, and (4) Twentieth-Century (1-11). According to Altman, genre theory prior to the nineteenth century was dominated by Aristotelian models of generic prescription in which the borders of generic definition between comedy and tragedy, for example, were seen primarily as a priori rules setting the parameters for what counts as an effective genre text. Neoclassical genre theory then borrowed Aristotelian categories but was also marked by a growing debate over the

15 problem of mixed genres like tragicomedy (1-4). Next, nineteenth-century genre theory, with the rise of romanticism, replied to the mixed genre debate of the Neoclassicists by celebrating generic intermingling and building a canon around early “masters of the mixed genre”: Isaiah, Aeschylus, Rabelais, and Shakespeare (5). But later nineteenth-century genre theory also saw the rise of evolutionary science, and Darwinist approaches to biological evolution were utilized in the literary historical models of critics like Ferdinand Brunetiere (1890-1894) to describe generic evolution. Altman himself provides an evolution of critical definitions of genre, but he also notes that these critical stages are not historically static. Altman is aware of the specific merits and limitations of evolutionary descriptions of genre and notes that each of these earlier stages informs twentieth-century genre debates. Warshow’s interest in genre as being in a state of evolution is one of many examples of the seductiveness of the evolutionary model. Warshow assumes that an evolutionary model has many merits, but the limitations of this model also seem clear when we read Warshow’s piece more critically. The evolutionary model allows Warshow to describe opposing attentions to realism and style that emerge in the western as early as the realist film The Qx-Bow Incident (1943) and the stylized Stagecoach (1939), but Warshow’s description of these tendencies finally assumes a priori generic criteria privileging classical balance. Warshow’s is a method wherein films that are neither too realist nor too stylized are judged aesthetically to be exemplars of the genre. Therefore, Warshow’s model is fundamentally conservative in artistic terms and at least implicitly Aristotelian, prescribing characteristics for genre texts to follow without adequately explaining the significance of cultural context to transformations in the western. Like Warshow, film theory’s great pathfinder André Bazin took interest in the western as an evolving genre. In “The Evolution of the Western,” Bazin argues, like Warshow, for classical balance as a prescriptive generic criteria: Stagecoach (1939) is the ideal example of the maturity of the style brought to classic perfection. John Ford stmck the ideal balance between social myth, historical reconstruction, psychological tmth, and the traditional theme of the western mise en scene. None of these elements dominated any other. Stagecoach is like a wheel, so perfectly made that it remains in equilibrium on its axis in any position. (149)

16 Bazin is kinder to Stagecoach than Warshow is, but the men share an interest in prescriptive criticism. Certainly, I do not mean to argue against the value of aesthetic judgments. Nor, assuming they have less worth for some theoretical discussions than for others, do I intend to argue that aesthetic judgments are avoidable. Rather, I seek to note that Bazin’s and Warshow’s evolutionary models hint at social context, though both subordinate social context to aesthetic balance, in fact disparaging texts that are too socially relevant Bazin, the great realist is more generous than Warshow to socially conscious texts, perhaps loathing only the most didactic versions. And while Bazin’s criticism of the western has a prescriptive element he also begins to recognize genre texts in the social context of their time of production. Growing out of Bazin’s evolutionary model is his definition for a postwar type, “the superwestem’’: The superwestem is a western that would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for some additional interest to justify its existence—an aesthetic, sociological, moral, psychological, political, or erotic interest, in short some quality extrinsic to the genre and which is supposed to enrich it. (150-151) Further articulating the social and moral namre of the superwestem, Bazin goes on to add, “the profounder influence of the war is undoubtedly more indirect and one must look to find it wherever the film substitutes a social or moral theme for the traditional one’’ (151). For Bazin, the superwestem has a social and moral dimension that focuses its “traditional” western trappings. The Ox-Bow Incident is a westem but also a critique of vigilante violence, and Bazin, like so many later critics, reads High Noon (1953) and Allan Dwan’s Silver Lode ('1954') as indictments of “rampant McCarthyism” (151, 153). It is easy to zirgue with the evolutionary nature of Bazin’s definition of the superwestem. Are prewar westems like Stagecoach (1939) and Jesse James (1939) “traditional” in some timeless sense outside of social context and commentary? Certainly not. Stagecoach is now routinely read as social commentary, particularly as commentary on the greed and avarice of banking during the Great Depression. Likewise, Jesse James’s overwhelming interest in the power of the press to shape public opinion about its outlaw hero joins the company of Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as an exploration of media power on the verge of the United States’s entrance 17 into World War H. Therefore, the evolutionary nature of Bazin’s model is at odds with the broader applications of his notion of the superwestem, a socially and morally specific westem subgenre that could just as easily apply to prewar westems as postwar westems. The evolutionary model of criticism, in its broadest sense, no doubt grows from an impulse toward chronology in textual history at large, and it would be absurd to roundly criticize chronology as an organizational strategy. Chronology provides the organizational stracture for each of the aforementioned worics on the frontier and to varying degrees for early studies of the literary, film, and television westem: Folsom’s The American Westem Novel (1966) is organized by a combination of themes and chronology, Fenin and Everson’s The Westem: From Silents to Cinerama (1962) and Wright’s Six Guns and Society (1975) read westem film by historical chronology, and Ralph and Donna Brauer’s The Horse, the Gun, and the Piece of Property (1975) emd Yoggy’s Riding the Video Range (1995) chronologically map the history of the television westem. Moreover, Aquila’s “Blaze of Glory: The Mythic West in Pop and Rock Music’’ (1996) and Bindas’s “Cool Water, Rye Whiskey, and Cowboys: Images of the West in Country Music” (1996) use chronology to chart histories of the West in popular music, a logical choice for groundbreaking excursions into westem popular songs. The real danger of evolutionary models lies not in chronology itself but in the suggestion, often difficult to prove without exception, that generic evolution moves from an uncomplicated infancy through periods of increasing self-consciousness to its demise. Warshow’s and Bazin’s models both imply such an evolution, wherein a primitive period gives way to a classical period followed by increasing stylistic self-consciousness and realistic attempts to embrace the “real world outside” of the getue. Later critics like Thomas Schatz in his book Hollvwood Genres: Formulas. Filmmaking, and the Studio Svstem (1981) also rely on this sort of evolutionary model, though Schatz articulates the evolution of the westem in terms of studios’ responses to audiences’ understandings of the genre and audiences’ increasing unwillingness to suspend disbelief without innovative transformations in genre. Some critics have critiqued the stylistic and realistic complexity afforded later genre texts as a form of critical privilege and an inaccurate historical model. For example, Jon Tuska’s “The American Westem Cinema: 1903-Present” (1974) is arranged 18 chronologically, as the essay’s title suggests, but Tuska criticizes others’ tendencies to attribute sympathy for American Indians only to certain exceptional early films and later periods of film history: It is now custom to point to these films [i.e.. The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Vanishing American (19251. on which Tim McCoy worked as technical consultant], and perhaps to McCoy’s own vehicles War Paint (M-G-M, 1926) and Winners of the Wilderness (M-G-M, 1927), as rare incidents of compassion amid hundreds of Westems picturing Indians as mindless savages. Other critics call attention to Broken Arrow (20th Century-Fox, 1950) as a renewal of this trend right down to the anti-white-man films of the Seventies. Of course this assertion entirely ignores features like Tim McCoy’s End of the Trail (Columbia, 1932) or Gene Autry’s The Cowbov and the Indians (Columbia, 1949) which fall during the decades of ostensible “neglect” and are exceedingly moving in their sympathies— directly from the “B” units where you’d least anticipate finding them. (40)

It is worth noting that Hollywood’s most sympathetic or revisionist images of Native Americans are full of Eurocentric platitudes and egregious stereotypes no matter when they have been released, as I suspect Tuska would admit, but Tuska’s criticism of the gaps frequently missed in an evolutionary model of generic and political development is noteworthy. More recently. Tag Gallagher’s “Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral” (1995) also debunks strict adherence to evolutionary theories, noting that one could just as easily call the westem cyclical as evolutionary. His essay notes that many genre smdies neglect the subtleties of older films. In fact, Gallagher points out that The Great Train Robbery (1903) has self-reflexive elements, with a gunman pointing at the screen, and an awareness of generic convention from frontier and westem-theme texts in previous media, which would imply that self-awareness is nothing exclusive to “adult” or revisionist westems. I chart the evolution of the evolutionary model of criticism as a necessary caution for my own study. While I am concerned with the self-consciousness of 1960s westems regarding issues of heroism and sociopolitical context, a feature of the period’s westems that I think merits closer inspection, by no means do I mean to suggest that earlier periods of the westem lack complexity or depth. Rather, I focus on a specific decade to supplement the historical breadth of previous studies with a closer reading of the complexities of 1960s western heroes, a reading not really possible in studies that seek to cover most or all of the century’s periods of the westem. Just as we need to approach earlier periods of the westem in greater depth, exploring the subtleties of earlier westem 19 texts, so too do we need to interrogate words like “revisionist,” “self-reflexive,” “self- conscious,” and “anti-hero” as these words have been applied to the westems of the 1960s. I believe we are now in a better position to do so, and the preponderance of broad historical chronologies in criticism of the westem is less a liability than a sign that the earliest critics felt the need to lay the foundations for more focused later studies by establishing just what these westems are and have been through the years. In the next section of this chapter I explore the issue of “what these westems are” as this issue relates to quests for origins, definitions, and legitimacy in the criticism on the westem.

ORIGINS, DEFINITIONS, AND LEGITIMACY:

(2) the location of the origins of the genre in far older conventional formulae like medieval tales of “knights-errantry”; (3) prescription of clear boundaries wherein texts must operate to remain adequately representative of the genre; (4) the argument that the westem, like many genres, is defined by stock characters and settings that, by functioning within clear boundaries, mark their texts’ membership to the genre.

In his preface to Rieupeyrout’s Le Westem ou le cinéma américain par excellence (1953), André Bazin explores the label “American Film Par Excellence” as applied to the westem, but much of Bazin’s preface lingers not on American traditions but on European precedents to the westem. Bazin notes Stagecoach’s resemblance to de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, shows how the westem explores the gender themes of “Genesis,” compares Billy the Kid to Achilles, and applauds the genre’s “Comeille-like simplicity” (144-147). Like Warshow, who compares the westem to tales of “knights-errantry,” Bazin locates the origins of the genre in the arts of the Classical and European world. Such origins are informative and reflect the legacy of comparative studies of hero archetypes in genre studies. However, aesthetic models have so long privileged innovation over convention, that the usefulness of broader historical connections has often been only part of the reason for summoning Classical epic and medieval romance to describe the American westem; 20 i.e., there are riietorical reasons for summoning more legitimate categories of heroic narrative as well. Discussions of the westem realized quite early on the potential origins of the genre in earlier periods, but the celebratory nature of comparisons of the westem hero to epic heroes past is at least partly attributable to an anxiety of influence in early or even recent studies of popular cultural texts. At worst such references to older European models neglect the important influence of contemporary context upon any given westem text. At best the location of origins for the westem in non-American sources can illuminate the discussion of iimovation. Kathryn C. Esselman’s “From Camelot to Monument Valley: Dramatic Origins of the Westem Film” (1974), for example, notes “the self-conscious structuring of a film like George Stevens’ Shane according to Arthurian modes” and the self-conscious use of the name “Paladin” (i.e., knight errant) in television’s Have Gun. Will Travel. These can be particularly informative connections, especially when the texts to which they refer draw specific attention to their older sources. Reading texts as solely innovative without regard for their generic sources contributes to flawed understanding of genre history. For example, a movie like Star Wars (1977) may be best categorized as an eclectic mix of Arthurian legend, samurai films, westems, war movies, etcetera. Star Wars explicitly quotes and/or borrows from Ford’s The Searchers (’19541 and Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (1958). Many fans of Star Wars know this, but to make note of these sources is more than a parlor game. Since the new Hollywood of the 1970s was spearheaded by film-school graduates, the decade is full of such quoting, but the success of movies like Jaws (1975), Rocky (1976), and Star Wars has also contributed to a cultural amnesia surrounding film history wherein movies produced relatively late in the genres of horror, boxing, and science fiction have become for many the most well-known models. If for no other reason, it is good to keep in mind where generic pattems come from. In addition to locating the conventions of the westem in older genres, early critics straggled to articulate the legitimacy of the westem for academic study against accusations regarding genre texts’ historical inaccuracies. Critics were forced to contend with the issue of historical veracity, a criteria to which the westem typically adheres superficially at best. Rieupeyrout’s (1953) study of the film westem, according to Bazin, emphasizes the 21 genre’s “faithfulness to history” (Bazin 142). Most early and recent studies, however, emphasize the western’s lack of historical faithfulness. From Kent Ladd Steckmesser’s The Westem Hero in History and Legend (1965) to Buck Rainey’s Westem Gunslingers in Fact and on Film (1998) the disparity between fact and legend has intrigued scholars. Some critics have turned to supplementing their textual analysis with careful attention to the factual west. Jon Tuska (1985), for example, opens one of his studies with the promise to keep “historical reality at all times as the basic standard against which to measure the degrees of deviation and by this means to begin to understand the motivations behind the calculated distortions” (xiiv). Furthermore, this interest in the “real” west, like many trends in the criticism on the westem, is hardly new. Historians and artists of the West have struggled with the slippery notion of the “real” west since long before any serious criticism on the modem westem. In fact, issues of historical veracity may constitute the genre’s longest debate. For most 1960s and 1970s critics of the westem the trick, both methodologically useful and rhetorically savvy, was to separate the issue of reality from the significance of the westem. In his study of the literary westem, for example, James K. Folsom argues that the westem is best read as romance, which he opposes to the more mimetic interests of the novel.'*^ The opposition between romance and novel has frequently been used to disparage romance as the novel’s weak sister. This opposition is an obviously gendered form of elitism operating at the heart of literary studies that is considerably ironic when applied to the formula westem, since the genre is most associated with a male readership or viewership. Folsom, however, uses the opposition to note that the criteria used to exclude the westem from serious discussions of literature are wrongly applied to a genre that “has less to do with the facts of history” than with something like Hawthome’s “truth of the human heart” (21). For Folsom the westem has historical legitimacy, but it is a legitimacy bom in truths of human nature rather than in bmte facts. Jim Kitses (1969) further articulates the importance of judging westems’ social value not based on facts but rather on “milieu” and “mores”:

^ Owen Wister himself, in a 1902 letter ‘To the Reader” of The Virginian, proclaims the merits of treating history through conventions of romance and through Octional characters. 22 First of all, the westem is American history. Needless to say, this does not mean that the hints are historically accurate or that they cannot be inade by Italians. More simply, the statement means that American frontier life provides the milieu and mores of the westem, its wild bunch of cowboys, its straggling towns and mountain scenery. (8) Both Folsom’s “tmth” and Kitses’s “milieu” and “mores” now seem pretty vague, but each critic’s straggle to explain and legitimize the study of popular genre is noteworthy and helped to lay the groundwork for future studies of the westem, many of which would continue to locate the relationship between genre texts and social reality in the westem’s constructs of “truth” and “milieu” rather than in its objective treatment of history. Warshow, Bazin, Folsom, and Kitses legitimize the westem on grounds that beg for a more sophisticated notion of the relationship between ideology and the westem’s “truths.” Kitses in particular straggles to articulate, albeit ambiguously, that movies like Major Dundee (1965) reflect American race politics, but most of Kitses’s reading ends up legitimizing the study of geiure through auteur theory, and this anxiety of influence consumes precious pages that might otherwise be devoted to a clearer discussion of just what he means, for example, by an “American race politics.” However, to criticize the shortcomings of the 1950s and 1960s genre critics is like standing on the shoulders of giants and kicking them in the head. The fact that my study has come full circle back to many of the interests first expressed by Kitses is a testament to the lasting power of what these critics were trying to do. Less specific but no less useful than the attribution of the westem’s conventions to older models or history is the related attribution of the westem’s longevity to its status as “myth.” In fact, the mythic approach to the westem has not only offered critics a way to value the genre despite its lack of historical veracity, but the mythic approach has also allowed for a discussion of the relationship between the westem and the “real” late nineteenth century in which it is usually set and for a discussion of the relationship between the genre text and the sociopolitical context of its production. It is really through the notion of myth that the study of the genre broke away from the burden of historical accuracy. While historical accuracy has thankfully remained an area of significant inquiry into the westem and especially into the West itself, the myth approach has allowed critics to analyze 23 other kinds of connections between genre and the “real world,” specifically connections that have less to do with the late nineteenth century than with the contemporary climate of culture that produces westems. Will Wright’s Six Guns and Society (1975) is a particularly significant example of the myth approach. Wright’s structuralist study builds on the work of Kenneth Burke, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Vladimir Propp, describing the westem in terms of “two analytically separable components: [1] an abstract stmcture through which the human mind imposes a necessary order and [2] a symbolic content through which the formal structure is applied to contingent, socially defined experience” (11). Wright starts by defining myth as “a communication from a society to its members: the social concepts and attitudes determined by the history and institutions of a society are communicated to its member through its myths” (16). From here Wright proceeds to define the westem as a form of myth, and he sets out to show that transformations in the organization of the westem’s base structural components reflect historical and institutional change. Wright describes the conventions of the westem in terms of shared “functions,” which are “one-sentence statements that describe either a single action or a single attribute of a character”: “The hero fights the villains,” “The hero is unknown to the society,” but not “The hero fights and defeats the villains” or “The hero is unknown and a gunfighter” (25). These functions are “narrative (syntagmatic)” and reveal what the characters “do,” but Wright is also interested in what the characters “mean,” meanings he claims are defined through “binary (paradigmatic)” oppositions with other characters (24). Using Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1469), Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), and Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilies (1891), Wright shows, “In all three stories the conceptualization of social types is the same; but in each case the narrative structure changes to portray a different model of interaction between these types, and these changes can be seen to correspond to changes in the social institutions and attitudes” (26-27). In Mallory’s text, which reflects Mallory’s time, a middle-class female (Elaine) seduces an upper-class male (Lancelot), but she is finally left by Lancelot and dies, revealing that it is wrong for Elaine to aspire to be part of the upper class. In Hardy’s novel, however, an upper-class male rapes middle- class Tess before leaving her. Tess, like Elaine, dies, but the implication, according to 24 Wright, is one of middle class “suffering at the hands of the evil upper class.” Therefore, while the binary oppositions of upper-class male and middle-class female remain the same, the substitution of the “rape” function for the older “seduction" function reveals changes in European class consciousness over time. Whatever the superficialities of this reading of complex works, Wright’s structural model is appealing, suggesting, like structuralism in general, that if we can just approach mythic narrative with a scientific attention to the myth’s base axioms we can describe changes in the larger structure with objective precision. Applying this structuralist method to top-grossing film westems after 1930, Wright charts an evolution of the westem through dominant plots and themes; (1) Classical Plot, (2) Vengeance Variation, (3) Transition Theme, (4) Professional Plot (30-31). Wright’s specific catalog of functions is too detailed to describe here in its entirety, but I will describe some of the differences between each type and what these differences mean to Wright. In the “Classical Plot” the hero enters the social group, confronts a villain that is stronger than the society, defeats the villain, and is accepted into the society, losing his special status. In the “Vengeance Variation” the relationship between the hero and society is subject to a reordering of functions: Unlike the classical hero who joins the society because of his strength and their weakness, the vengeance hero leaves the society because of his strength and their weakness. Moreover, the classical hero enters his fight because of the values of society, whereas the vengeance hero abandons his fight because of those same values. (59) The “Vengeance Variation” is most common in the 1950s. Stagecoach (1939) is Wright’s only example of the “Vengeance Variation” before the late 1940s, all other examples from the 1930s through the mid-1940s being “Classical.” The ‘Transition Theme,” beginning with Broken Arrow (1950), “is almost a direct inversion of the classical plot. The hero is inside society at the start and outside at the end” (74). Finally, in the “Professional Plot,” beginning with Rio Bravo (19591. the hero is back to fighting for society, but “only as a job they accept for pay or for love of fighting, not from commitment to ideas of law and justice” (85).

25 What all of this explains for Wright is America’s transition from a market economy to a corporate economy, through a 1950s marked by other tensions between the dominant society and a “weaker group,” e.g.. Native Americans, who the hero defends (83). The individualism of the “Classical Plot” is reconciled with the needs of a market society; individualism serves the social structure and is finally made part of the whole. In the “Vengeance Variation,” however, the westem begins to question the compatibility of the individual and society, suggesting that the society is inadequate, but finally reincorporating the hero into the social structure. The “Transition Theme” sides the hero with a “weaker group” against society and, therefore, furthers the critique of society implicit in the “Vengeance Variation.” Lastly, the “Professional Plot” suggests a corporate relationship between people and society wherein the society may be inadequate but values like professionalism can model alternate forms of community relations. Wright’s goal is to structurally describe the westem as an American myth subject to changes in American values, and he succeeds admirably in many ways. It is hard to criticize Wright’s choice of films, since he uses box office to justify those choices, and the pattems he notes do seem to exist. Moreover, while Wright’s discussion of the “Transition Theme” is short, this theme in particular affords a space where another critic might flush out the minute details of the hero’s relationship with the “weaker group.” Unfortunately, despite the fact that he qualifies his method with readings of some specific films, Wright’s book frequently lingers so long on its own structural descriptions that the differences between, for example, individual “Professional Plot” westems begs more detailed explanation. Rio Bravo and The Wild Bunch are both about professional values, but the movies are so ideologically distinct in so many different ways that I am left wondering how many subcategories of plot and theme it would take to fill in the variations of each of Wright’s four main types. A formal interest in binary oppositions, like that between individual and society, has always been a mainstay of criticism on the westem, and the interest in oppositions still remains in my project and many others. But the vogue of structuralism seems to have passed primarily because the idealism of breaking a text down into irreducible parts is now tempered by an important realization; i.e., there are too many variables goveming the organization of these parts for stmcturalism to satisfy the objective

26 impulse informing its popularity to begin with. For instance, one variable within films Wright defines as “Professional Plot” westems involves the group to whom the heroes offer their allegiance. In The Wild Bunch, as I will argue, the group to whom one offers his word is arguably more important than professional values themselves, and understanding the tensions between the heroes and various social groups in Peckinpah’s film requires specific knowledge of diegetic sociopolitical contexts and sociopolitical contexts during Peckinpah’s time. Nevertheless, we are still interested in structure and probably always will be, and critics have consistently described the westem’s social dimension in terms of myth. Therefore, Wright’s study remains an important stop on the critical trail for the ambition with which he approaches a description of the popular westem. Wright explains the westem as myth by reducing the genre to its most basic structure of functions and binary oppositions, reading transformations in this structure as reflective of sociopolitical transformations. Others are less scientific in their definitions of myth but no less inclined to find the westem’s social relevance therein. Rita Parks’s The Westem Hero in Film and Television: Mass Media Mvthologv (1982) defines myth simply as a “portrayal of human experience by means of story or symbol” (13). But myth also has a sociopolitical context specific to its time of production in that “the manner of recounting the myth indicates something about the teller as well as about the listener—about the artist’s world view as well as that of the audience” (14). For Parks, as for other aforementioned critics, the westem’s “historical accuracy is of much less import than its ability to convey the human condition as it is perceived at a specific point in time.” Since “myth” is Park’s term for the westem’s “metaphorical depiction of human experience,” the term is part of her assessment of the genre in sociopolitical terms outside historic faithfulness. Parks’s study is noteworthy for her interest in myth in the context of production and reception and for her emphasis, like Warshow, on the hero as a figure through which to read transformations in the westem as myth. Moreover, Parks, like earlier critics, maps the nineteenth-century origins of the westem myth and, particularly, of the westem hero.

27 Unfortunately, almost half of Paric’s study is devoted to methodology and roots of the hero, leaving about eighty pages in which to broadly discuss the history of the film and television westem hero. Other critics explore the difference between myth and reality in more detail. Barbara Howard Meldrum, for example, in her introduction to Under the Sun: Mvth and Realism in Westem American Literamre (1985), writes, ‘Typically, we associate the term [myth] with acts of conquest (of the land, of Indians, of the forces of evil) and a cluster of values: freedom, courage, honor, daring, manliness” (2). By equating values with “conquest,” Meldrum implies a place for history in the discussion of myth, since exploring myth can become a way of foregrounding the ways in which values shape our memory of conquest. Furthermore, Meldrum’s project is larger than just this one facet of the relationship between myth and reality. The collection of essays she introduces represents a number of relationships between myth and realism as means of framing westem realities and values, and the collection finally uses the term “myth” not to escape the necessity of the real historical past or present but rather to enrich discussions of the relationship between formal conventions and reality. Max Westbrook’s essay “Myth, Reality, and the American Frontier,” one of the pieces Meldrum introduces in the book, perhaps states the relationship between myth and reality best when he summarizes one definition of myths as “organizing stories which explain a human enterprise, stories which shape the history and values of a given people” (14). Myth, therefore, is not just some idealized reflection of “history and values,” but also a means of shaping history and values. Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation presents another vocabulary complication, exploring “genre” through “myth” but also including an interest in “ideology.” Given the uses of myth in books by Wright, Parks, and in Under the Sun, not to mention in Slotkin’s earlier books, his introduction of “ideology” as a way of understanding geme and myth is less a novelty than an attempt to treat geiu-e in more specific political terms. Slotkin writes: The concepts ofideology, myth, and genre highlight three different but closely related aspects of the culture-making process. Ideology is the basic system of concepts, beliefs, and values that defines a society’s way of interpreting its place in the cosmos and the meaning of its history [...]. In any given society certain expressive forms or genres—\i\ie the credo, sermon, or manifesto—provide ways of articulating ideological concepts directly and explicitly. But most of the time the 28 assumptions of value inherent in a culture’s ideology are tacitly accepted as “givens.” Their meaning is expressed in the symbolic narratives of mythology and is transmitted to the society through various genres of mythic expression. It is the mythic expression of ideology that will be our primary concern. (5) For Slotkin, genres transmit ideologically loaded mythology; some genres do so explicitly while others do so implicitly. Notice also that the “genres” Slotkin mentions are not types of story but rather types of discourse. Slotkin seeks to explore politicized myth, not the universal myth of Jungian and structuralist anthropology. Rather, Slotkin’s myth is “shaped by historical contingency” and carries ideology in the form of various genres. Slotkin’s introduction is notably entitled “The Significance of the Frontier Myth in American History,” a title created by adding the word “Myth” to the title of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous address. Gunfighter Nation, which builds on his own studies and other studies from Smith to Kolodny, is important to my work because Slotkin finds specific relationships between westem imagery and American politics. For example, Slotkin analyzes John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” as an ideological appropriation of frontier imagery, and he notes how literary and filmic westems reflect the politics of their time. But Slotkin’s interest in “ideology” hints at a question I consistently find myself asking as I read the myth criticism on the westem: How essential is the term “myth” to our readings of the westem? Certainly, the term is important insofar as the westem borrows from the mythologies of older and remote cultures. Moreover, the term is important insofar as so many critics use it to describe the westem. The term “myth” has provided a means of clarifying the value of the westem beyond facile notions of historical veracity and a means of defining the relationship between genre and values that shape not only our sense of the historical past but also our sense of the present. However, the myth approach has also grown out of a critical anxiety of influence, wherein the appeal of mythology, like the appeal to European formulas, both describes the westem and justifies its merit as a subject for study. It now seems entirely clear to me that the westem is worth studying. Tomes of criticism attest to its worth. Therefore, in my discussion of 1960s westems I very rarely apply the word “myth.” While I believe the myth approach still has value, the word itself can often be either imprecise or over-specialized, so, despite my recognition of the importance of the myth approach to reading genre in sociopolitical context, I believe

29 that using the term opens a critical can of worms that is itself book-worthy and of marginal importance to my own claims about the 1960s westem. In fact, others have described the approach to the westem in sociopolitical context with other words besides “myth,” and Slotkin’s approach might just as readily be described as an “allegorical” approach as a myth approach. In the next section, I will explore the allegorical approach and what this approach offers specifically to a discussion of the sociopolitical potential of the westem.

GENRE AS SOCIOPOLmCAL ALLEGORY:

(5) the argument that the westem, like many genres, has a social potential, though critics subject this social potential to a diversity of critical definitions and embrace it with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

I began my survey of criticism on the westem with Warshow’s essay partly because Warshow’s frustration with the failure of High Noon’s hero to leave his mark on the town reveals his limited notion of the hero’s social potential. Since Warshow relies on values like “virtue” and “style” to address the hero’s social function, Warshow can only read the town’s unwillingness to help the hero fight as “vulgar anti-populism” on the part of the producer Stanley Kramer (462). According to Warshow’s notion of the hero’s social function, the filmmakers must have contempt for society. Why else would the town not help this virtuous man? It is fitting that High Noon is now routinely read and taught as an allegory of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) communist “witch hunts” and of the subsequent Hollywood black list that sent High Noon screenwriter Carl Foreman underground. Reading High Noon allegorically makes the film’s hero again socially relevant as an honest man betrayed by his own people, and the film’s treatment of the townspeople suddenly becomes less an anti-populist tirade than a veiled interrogation of the injustices of McCarthyist paranoia. Therefore, reading High Noon as sociopolitical allegory changes the film from what Warshow reads as a flaw stemming from the failure of the film’s hero to find a diegetic audience for his virtue;

30 instead, the film becomes a successful use of a popular genre to comment on an important sociopolitical issue of the film’s time. In short. High Noon becomes The Crucible (1953) in spurs. Michael Coyne (1997) argues that the allegorical reading of High Noon is now so well established that dropping the name of the film alone has become a useful rhetorical device for politicians: Even Bill Clinton, despite his posturing as John Kennedy’s heir, has gone on record declaring High Noon his favourite film. This was a shrewd choice: by selecting a Westem Clinton touched base with the conservative heartland; naming High Noon, with its celebrated anti-McCarthy subtext, enabled him to reemphasize his liberal credentials. (2) Nonetheless, the “liberal” status of High Noon has been contested for some time, first by Swedish critics Harry Schein and Gunner Oldin and then by Philip French, whose Westems (1973) is a foundational allegorical study of the westem. French agrees with Schein’s reading of High Noon as a potential “allegory about American foreign policy and the Korean War.” French writes: The marshal (America) had wanted peace after clearing up the town five years before (i.e.. World War II), and reluctantly must buckle on his gunbelt again in the face of new aggression (the Korean War), and eventually his pacifist wife (American isolationists) must see where her true duty lies and support him. (35) Whether anti-McCarthyist liberalism or anti-isolationist patriotism, an allegorical reading of High Noon means that westem heroism is no longer reducible to an adherence to a single code of action but must instead be seen in the milieu of the westem’s production and initial release. Moreover, without a universal definition of heroism, the social potential of the westem hero changes in important ways. First, the hero and heroic action are no longer the product of a remote archetype grounded in the past. Warshow’s description of horses as “inspired chargers of knights- errantry” implies that their riders are the westem’s answer to knights in shining armor, and there are intimations of knighthood in Warshow’s notion of the Westerner’s “virtue” (459). In this respect, Warshow shares a critical kinship with André Bazin, whose influential early writings legitimize the westem by giving it a European pedigree in romantic stories of chivalry. While there are certainly numerous similarities between the westem hero and knights of yore, Warshow and Bazin’s versions of what Coyne calls the “mythic 31 approach” to the westem, universalize the westem and the westem hero at the expense of sociopolitical context An allegorical approach can situate a genre text in its sociopolitical milieu without much of the baggage of antiquity implicit in the mythic approach. Secondly, an allegorical approach illuminates the social potential of the westem hero by begging the question, “Virtuous toward whom?” Situating High Noon in the context of 1950s America sheds light on the actions and reactions of the film’s characters. That High Noon can be read as either anti-McCarthyist or anti-isolationist does not so much point to a flaw in allegorical reading as it points to a critical necessity inspired by the allegorical approach: the necessity to think about the potential alliances allegorically implied by the characters and conflicts in the text, the potential intentions of its producers, and the potential concems of its audience. Reading High Noon allegorically, I am forced to ask an important question: Whose side is Gary Cooper on? I resent the townspeople in the film. I resent their detachment and apathy. Therefore, perhaps I resent detachment and apathy in general. However, if I see the film in the plausible, allegorical contexts of McCarthyism or the Korean War, I may be forced to make a conscious political decision. More importantly, if I am not conscious of the text’s allegorical possibilities, I may be forced to make an unconscious political decision. Critics who oppose allegorical reading belittle the approach as a critical game of find-the-subtext that finally reveals very little of intellectual value. Jon Tuska (1985), for example, argues: Even when it is known that a film was meant to have an allegorical interpretation, as for example High Noon (United Artist, 1952), I do not see that this information makes High Noon a better film nor can it heighten our appreciation of it as an example of cinematic art (8)

Tuska also criticizes what he calls the “decades” approach, closely related to the allegorical approach: The same objections I raised with regard to the 'Western as allegory” would apply equally here, but there is even a further, unverifiable supposition, namely that films, and in this case Westem films, were somehow responsive to such things as “attitudes, beliefs, concems, and deepest desires” of audiences. As an historian and as one who has seen at least once every surviving Westem film, I must amend this idea somewhat. Westems have, for the most part, avoided confrontations with audience attitudes, beliefs, and concems. (8-9)

32 My response to Tuska’s criticism of allegorical reading is that, from a cultural studies standpoint, it matters less that High Noon is made a “better film” by analysis than that analysis can begin to articulate the film’s sociopolitical significance, e.g., how McCarthyism and/or the Korean War might have infiuenced the film’s production or the film’s reception. My point is not to ignore that cultural criticism does, in a canonical sense, make High Noon a “better film” by affording it academic privilege; rather, I want to argue that, while an allegorical reading rescues High Noon from Warshow’s cutting room floor, the point of reading the film allegorically is to reveal sociopolitical subtext. I, for one, think the ability to read subtext is not only a good academic skill but a good social skill as well. As for Tuska’s critique of the allegory-like “decades” approach, while I have not “seen at least once every surviving Westem film,” I still argue that the very reason that genres like the westem so thoroughly, effectively, and allegorically mirror their era is because the ostensible remoteness of the generic world from the time and space of the audiences’ world offers a venue to “safely” explore sociopolitical controversy. Nevertheless, the allegorical approach to the westem does present a series of problems that I hope to address in my dissertation. One problem with an allegorical approach to the westem is semantic. What do we mean when we say “allegorical”? French’s reading of High Noon as allegory of the Korean War means by “allegorical” a metaphor extended to cover the following: character—Gary Cooper as lawman equals America while Grace Kelly as pacifist wife equals American isolationism; story/plot—badman trouble “five years before” equals World War H, and “new aggression” equals Korean War. (35) But just how extended does the metaphor need to be before it can be called “allegory”? And, moreover, why “allegory” instead of “symbol” or “reflector” or some other term? In fact, none of the four major studies that Coyne defines as belonging to the “political/allegorical approach” make “allegory” a key term. While French calls High Noon allegory, his primary goal is simply to show that westems of the 1950s and 1960s tend to reflect the politics of Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, or William Buckley, and he really does not consistently stick to these categories, instead organizing

33 his book around chapters on “Politics, etc., and the Westem,” “Heroes and Villains, Women and Children,” “Indians and Blacks,” “Landscape, Violence, Poker,” and “The Post-Western.” Nevertheless, French’s individual analyses are often astute and his book opened the door for other studies of the westem as a reflection of politics. For another instance, Wright’s Six Guns and Societv is far less interested in allegory than in fînding a system of signification at work in the westem’s conventional structure, but Wright’s definition of myth has allegorical potential. John H. Lenihan’s Showdown: Confronting Modem America in the Westem Him (1980) has chapters arranged in a way similar to those in French’s book, e.g., “Cold War-Path,” “Racial Attitudes,” etcetera. While Lenihan also does without the term “allegory,” his readings are much closer to being allegorical, since the “Racial Attitudes” section reads transformations in the representation of American Indians alongside desegregation conflicts and Civil Rights activity in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, however, Lenihan is more concemed with comprehensively mapping changes in cultural images than in cormecting these changes to specific times. The closest study to what Coyne calls a “political/allegorical approach” is probably Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation, with his reading of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” as an ideological appropriation of frontier imagery and his attention to literary and filmic westems as reflections of the politics of their time. Coyne, like Slotkin, locates frontier imagery in political rhetoric and sees contemporary social and political problems reflected in westems. Coyne, however, focuses on film westems and uses popular publications like The New York Times. Time, and The New Republic along with box office numbers to gauge reception. My own approach is best described as “sociopolitical/allegorical” or the westem as “sociopolitical allegory.” I choose to maintain Coyne’s term “allegorical” because it cormotes a direct connection between text and some event or events. Most of the texts I analyze are neither extended metaphors in the sense that High Noon is nor easily reducible to a single incident as referent, but I maintain the term “allegorical” to distinguish my study from other cultural studies of the westem that read the westem according to broad, culturally relevant themes and motifs. For example, Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything (1992) explores themes of “Landscape,” “Women and the Language of Men,” and “Death” 34 with less regard for temporal specificity. Moreover, I use the adjective “sociopolitical” instead of Coyne’s “political” in order to stress a key difference between my study and those of Slotkin and Coyne. Both Slotkin and Coyne are more political than social in their allegorical readings in that their signposts for generic change are primarily politicians, and their interests in 1960s westems mainly revolve around politicians and American foreign policy. I am interested primarily in the alliances westem heroes make or break and what these alliances tell us about genre producers’ responses to more domestic social and political instabilities of the 1960s, from the high-profile poUtics of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to feminism to the politically ambiguous “hippie” counterculture of the late 1960s. Like French, Lenihan, Slotkin, and Coyne, I see westems as products of their time, as reflecting public anxieties. Therefore, my project is what Tuska calls “decades” as well as being “allegorical,” reading 1960s westem heroes as responses to the period’s rapid change. However, I pay specific attention to the ways in which hero-types in many of the era’s westems, especially the “good” badman and professional gunman, display a reluctance to fulfill their generic duty of saving the community. Through their reluctant heroes, the texts I will explore exemplify something more than what critics like André Bazin and Thomas Schatz might call late stages in generic evolution. Rather, these texts represent a world in which heroes must often choose between sociopolitically opposing communities and a world in which heroes are redefined by the choices they make. When I first introduced allegory as an altemative to Warshow’s reading of High Noon. I argued that allegorical reading forces me to ask an important question: “Whose side is Gary Cooper on?” An allegorical reading forces me to ask this question by suggesting that the hero’s heroism is not solely subject to universal mles of behavior but rather to a specific diegetic context that mirrors specific sociopolitical contexts at the time of the text’s production. Here I am reminded of a scene in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). In the film. Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads his gang to Mexico, where the bunch agrees to steal arms for Mapache’s (Emilio Fernandez)/cJera/es. The guns, which will be used to fight Pancho Villa and his revolutionaries, will inevitably support military action against the village of gang member Angel (Jaime Sanchez), an idyllic village whose 35 people have been kind and generous to the bunch. Therefore, the film’s heroes are morally tainted by their actions, and this moral taint is exacerbated when Mapache kidnaps Angel for stealing a box of the rifles and giving it to the revolutionaries. Having had enough of Pike’s “code” of fireewheeling, outlaw survival, Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine), Pike’s most enthusiastic apologist, finally confironts Pike with a claim that is central to understanding 1960s westem heroes: it’s not your word the counts; “it’s who you give it to.” While the 1960s hold no monopoly on ambivalent heroes, the decade’s sociopolitical turbulence earns the line from Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” (1965), “everybody’s shouting / ‘Which side are you on?’” (Lvrics 206). It is significant that the question “Which side are you on?” in Dylan’s song is mined from a union song, because the 1960s as a decade is in many cases analogous to a strike, and nobody wants to be a “scab.” Dylan’s association with the left and his reluctant leadership of a generation determined to enact sociopolitical change inform his use of the organizing slogan, which when used ironically reflects his anxiety about being reduced as an artist into a kind of political fortune cookie machine. Fittingly, though it often goes unacknowledged, Dylan’s songs are full of westem heroes who, like those in Peckinpah’s films, suggest limitations of westem heroism for serving sociopolitically progressive agendas. As the impulse to redefine heroic values to fit the values of progressive sociopolitical movements grew in the 1960s, so did a number of models of reluctance on the part of westem heroes. Frequently these models of reluctance have been defined in terms of “anti-heroism,” a vague term accounting for everyone from the villainous Hud Bannon in Larry McMurtry’s novel Horseman. Pass Bv (1961) to the money-hungry but finally heroically efficacious “Man With No Name” of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti westerns. The fact that my film students sometimes consider Clint Eastwood’s intemational westems with Leone to be “classic westems” attests to the seductiveness of anti-heroism for our present era, which is still skeptical about the westem and its heroes. This definition of the Leone films as “classic” also implies that something about these anti-heroes appeals to my students as the westem standard: dark but finally hero-centered. Why anti-heroes instead of no heroes at all? Instead of heroines? Instead of community action? Part of the answer

36 to these questions, as they pertain to Eastwood’s intemational heroes, is simply that the Man With No Name is cool, as is nihilism in a white patriarchy faced with threats to its pat notions of morality, heroism, patriotism, and white masculinity. However, while partly accurate, this answer is as vague as the term “anti-heroism.” In fact, there are dozens of kinds of anti-heroes. The term “anti-hero” denotes some opposition to heroism contradictorily embodied in a hero-type, but there are many implications for this hero ranging from the suggestion that heroism is strained by greed (e.g., the Leone films) to the suggestion that there are no genuine heroes (e.g., Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times). Because I have serious questions about what the “anti-” in “anti-hero” means and serious reservations about applying the term to broadly describe diverse narrative and sociopolitical situations, I prefer to discuss types of heroic reluctance and the ways in which these types of heroic reluctance reflect different responses to a number of sociopolitical conflicts in the 1960s. The reluctance of The Wild Bunch’s Dutch Engstrom to give his word without regard for “who you give it to” speaks to a reluctance to define heroic values without context. In a sense this heroic redefinition recalls Will Wright’s category of the “Transition Theme,” in which the hero disowns the dominant community because of his allegiance to a “weaker group.” But Wright does not call The Wild Bunch a “Transition Theme” westem, and, more importantly, foregrounding the idea that the westem hero has frequently served the dominant society only accounts for one layer of reluctant heroism in the 1960s and in The Wild Bunch. In fact, in Chapter Five I will argue that The Wild Bunch reveals a reluctance to define heroism in the service of an oppressive dominant culture (e.g., U. S. imperialism and Mapache’s militarist regime), but the film also reveals a reluctance to believe that the westem hero can be defined otherwise. I will show how this dual reluctance speaks to themes in Peckinpah’s work in which the sociopolitical inadequacy of heroes to serve against oppression is foregrounded not just as a critique of the westem hero but also as a way for the director to evade sociopolitical responsibility by making the impossibility of responsibility a key element in the genre. Therefore, my argument is two­ fold, referring (1) to types of reluctance embodied by heroes in the era’s westems and what this reluctance says about the potential of the hero to serve progressive interests and (2) to a 37 reluctance at the level of artistic production to move beyond foregrounding a critique of heroic potential and embrace models of action outside the formula hero. In the following section I explore these models of reluctance in more detail.

“WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?”: RELUCTANT HEROES / UNCERTAIN ALLIANCES:

(6) interest in the social potential of the westem often translates into or is drawn firom an interest in the social potential of the westem hero; (7) masculinity is at the center of definitions of the westem hero; (8) whiteness is at the center of definitions of the westem hero.

Using Buffalo Bill Cody’s claim, “I stood between savagery and civilization most all my early days,” Jim Kitses notes: Refracted through and pervading the genre, this ideological tension has meant that a wide range of variation is possible in the basic elements of the form. The plains and mountains of westem landscape can be an inspiring and civilizing environment, a moral universe productive of the westem hero, a man with a code. But this view, popularized by Robert Warshow in his famous essay “The Westemer,” is one­ sided. Equally the terrain can be barren and savage, surroundings so demanding that men are rendered morally ambiguous, or wholly bmtalized. In the same way, the community in the westem can be seen as a positive force, a movement of refinement, order and local democracy into the wilds, or as a harbinger of cormption in the form of Eastem values which threaten frontier ways. (10-11) Kitses cleverly suggests that oppositions of, for example, “East” and “West” need not presuppose stable values at these individual poles. Kitses’s ‘East” can be both “order and democracy” and “harbinger of cormption,” and Kitses states that “the West, for example, rapidly moves from being the spearhead of manifest destiny to the retreat of ritual” (12). In fact, revealing his list of oppositions, Kitses notes, “if we compare the tops and the tails of each sub-section, we can see the ambivalence at work at its outer limits” (11):

38 THE WILDERNESS Crvn,T7ATION The Individual The Community freedom restriction honour institutions self-knowledge illusion integrity compromise self-interest social responsibility solipsism democracy Nature Culture purity corruption experience knowledge empiricism legalism pragmatism idealism brutalization refinement savagery humanity The West The East America Europe the frontier America equality class agrarianism industrialism tu itio n change the past the future Some of the range of variation in Kitses’s list simply reflects manifest destiny. For example, the inclusion of America on both “The West” and “The East” sides of the opposition is not so much a paradox as an analogy that America is to Europe what the frontier is to America, an analogy grounded in a notion of European American progress. But Kitses’s list also illuminates contradictions at the heart of each column: with the “freedom” of the individual comes “solipsism”; with the “democracy” of the community comes “restriction.” These contradictions provide narrative tension in the westem, but they also awaken the westem’s social potential, though some critics see the social potential of the genre as limited. Some argue that these contradictions need not denote generic or social critique; they are just as easily contradictions that genre texts seek to make tidy as part of their narrative and ideological project. For example, Judith Hess Wright (1974) notes genre’s fundamentally conservative nature, reducing major social issues to two-dimentional plot conflicts. Her main accusation involves the isolationist nature of film genres, which she 39 sees as mariced by nostalgia and issues of independence at the expense of social concems. Jon Tuska’s aforementioned comment about the social limitations of westems also falls on the side of the debate that reads the westem as social evasion: “Westems have, for the most part, avoided confrontations with audience attitudes, beliefs, and concems” (8-9). The formulaic and temporally remote nature of the westem confirms for me some but not all of Wright’s and Tuska’s suspicions. Despite whatever is sociopolitically evasive in the stock plots, characters, and settings of the westem, the possibility of social corrunentaiy still looms large in the very nature of the conflicts the westem seeks to resolve: “equality” versus “class,” “agrarianism” versus “industrialism,” and “freedom” versus “restriction.” Therefore, the question becomes less a matter of whether the westem is filled with two-dimentional heroes and oppositions and more a matter of how geme texts resolve these oppositions and how these resolutions conunent upon the sociopolitical context of the era in which the texts are produced. I believe that Judith Hess Wright and Jon Tuska are correct in noting that geme texts are often evasive, but genre texts in the 1960s at least are evasive in ways that Wright and Tuska fail to note. These texts are evasive neither primarily for their two-dimentionality, as Wright suggests, nor for their avoidance of confrontations with audience beliefs, as Tuska claims. Rather, these texts constantly foreground the issues of sociopolitical evasion along with the inadequacy and reluctance of their heroes, and the texts are finally most evasive in the generic bind they create, wherein reluctance and evasion themselves, rather than commitment, become the most salient topics. In the 1950s and 1960s, the liminal status of the westem hero, forever trapped between the oppositions Kitses describes, is redefined in terms of more sociopolitically contemporary oppositions: femininity patriarchy people of color white establishment Southem state independence Northern federal law individualism conformity youth rebellion adult stability

40 In almost all 1960s cases the heroes mediating these oppositions and the artists producing westerns are male. Frequently, both heroes and artists are also white, which adds an eighth characteristic to our aforementioned seven, although this eighth is a characteristic as frequently assumed without debate as the masculinity of the hero is: (8) whiteness is at the center of definitions of the western hero. In rare cases when the heroes are people of color, the films of the era suggest the threat of assimilationism wherein the hero’s actions often serve racist, white interests. Such is the case in Leonard’s Hombre (1961) and Valdez is Coming (1970). In other cases white, male heroes struggle to represent disenfranchised people, but the texts I explore in the following chapters suggest anxieties about these heroes’ motives and levels of motivation. All of the authors I explore are self-conscious about convention, and this self- consciousness reveals doubts about the western heroes’ and the artists’ adequacy for changing times. Sometimes this self-consciousness is expressed through self-reflexive nods to convention, as in Hombre and Peckinpah’s Maior Dundee, where the convention of the narrator-initiate is used to foreground the ways in which race and gender complicate the heroes’ choices and heroic status. At other times this self-consciousness is expressed through self-reflexive references to an artist’s persona. The music of Bob Dylan and the films of Sam Peckinpah fit into this latter category of self-reflexivity. In both models of self-reflexivity, however, consciousness of the limitations of the heroes, the genre, and the artists becomes an end in itself.

THE CHAPTERS

Before moving on to an exploration of the authors, I use the second chapter of the dissertation to define types of reluctance in the westerns of the era. Chapter Two explores the western in the most pervasive medium of the late 1950s: television. Famous novelists like Gore Vidal and famous frlmmakers like Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Penn worked in 1950s television, but authorship in the medium is far less visible than in literature, film, or music. Therefore, television is less suitable for a discussion of authorship. Nonetheless, 41 television westerns of the late 1950s comprise one of the most prolific bodies of westerns in the history of the genre. In the late 1950s Life magazine reported “one-third of nighttime network hours filled with Westerns; the 1957 fall season opened with 28 new Westerns and the 1959 season introduced 32 new ones; of the fifty shows canceled at the end of the 1956-57 season not one was a Western series” (qtd. in Paries 130). While the television westem declined in the 1960s, it is almost inexcusable not to mention the medium that in many ways helped shape the course of the 1960s literary and film westem and certainly contributed a great deal to the westem in general. Chapter Two uses the television westem to chart the emergence of the 1960s reluctant hero. Television offered a venue for one of the most common artistic approaches to the sociopolitics of the westem: the “problem plot.” The problem plot was a variety of literary, film, and television westem common in the 1950s, and it usually explored issues of racism or some other social prejudice. Chapter Two begins by exploring the issue of heroism in the problem plot and then moves on to more subde sociopolitical anxieties surrounding reluctant and ambiguous heroes in other westem plots of the era. Chapter Two also introduces many of the allegorical implications of westem heroism explored throughout the dissertation by utilizing one of the most popular media of generic expression. Following this introduction to the themes of reluctance and evasion. Chapter Three tackles the 1960s westem writing of Elmore Leonard. Leonard is now more famous for his crime novels than for his westems, but the attention afforded the crime writing may be attributable to the fact that Leonard has written crime novels more recently in his career. Biographies by David Geherin (1989), James Devlin (1999), and Paul Challen (2000) have begun to explore Leonard’s contribution to formula writing and each devotes a small section to Leonard’s westem output, which tapered off in the early 1970s despite a few more westem tales in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and 1990s. Leonard’s Hombre (1961) took more than two years to sell because of shifts in the westem market from literature to television, but the book was named “as one of the twenty-five best westem novels of all time” by the Westem Writers of America, an accolade making the neglect of Leonard’s westem fiction even more surprising (Geherin 7, Devlin x). Moreover, Leonard’s short

42 fiction, novels, and/or screenplays were sources for a number of popular westem films: The Tall T (1957), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Hombre (1967), Valdez is Coming (1970), and Joe Kidd (19721. Leonard’s authorial persona is subdued, if not detached. This was true in the 1950s and 1960s partly because Leonard was relatively unknown, struggling to make ends meet by writing. Moreover, Leonard’s inclination, as Geherin notes, to “let it happen naturally,” without a great deal of embellishment drawing attention to the author’s style, was already present in his westems even though this tendency has become even more pronounced in his later writing (132). But if Leonard, writing in Detroit, did not play the westemer himself in the 1960s, he continued to produce westem writing against the wisdom of constant warnings from his editor Marguerite Harper, who feared that the westem market would soon dry up (Challen 40-47). Most interestingly, in westems of the 1960s and early 1970s Leonard consistently interrogates the relationship between hero and society by making his heroes biologically or culturally people of color, and his stubborn adherence to the westem heroic formula implies that the genre is particularly suited to such an interrogation. Other literatures of the American west emerged in the 1960s to reveal realities of westem history and contemporary life: American Indian writing, nature writing, new joumalism. Beat writing, and new realist writing about the contemporary west. Leonard’s writing, however, stays within the heroic formula specifically to explore how the genre’s conventional relationships between hero and society are strained by an emerging revolutionary race and gender consciousness in America. The reluctance of Leonard’s heroes to act heroically is observed through the lens of racial assimilation anxieties of the 1960s, and Leonard’s project is to maintain race and gender stereotypes of the formula to a degree in order to dramatize the potential and inadequacies of westem formula heroes for addressing racial tensions and related gender tensions of the era. Chapter Four is a case study of the film Major Dundee (1965), directed by the 1960s’ most infamous westem filnunaker Sam Peckinpah. Major Dundee ('1965') is among the cinema’s most interesting fiascoes. The cavaliy film’s hopelessly convoluted narrative is partly attributable to loggerheaded battles between director Sam Peckinpah, producer Jerry Bresler, and Columbia, but the film’s most interesting failures are its attempts at 43 cultural border crossing. Major Dundee borrows from John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950) the premise of a river connoting cultural borders beyond its geographic denotation. Ford’s Rio Grande symbolizes post-bellum divisions between North and South, and Major Dundee borrows this premise but uses it to explore so many divisions—North and South, white and Apache, white and African American, United States and Mexico, European and American, male and female—that narrative failure is inevitable. The film’s failure is bom in the reckless ambition of its struggle to reflect myriad mid-1960s conflicts across cultures. My chapter explores three of Major Dundee’s border crossings, symbolized by river crossings, as a self-conscious commentary on the hero Dundee’s twisted version of a multicultural education. Dundee’s border crossings are appropriations of perceived cultural traits from groups outside of his understanding, accompanied by forced assimilation of the groups themselves. “Southern rebels,” “renegade Indians,” and “revolutionary Mexicans” model heroic behaviors Dundee exploits, but the real Southerners, Indians, and Mexicans are finally consumed by Dundee’s mission as Dundee evades responsibility for the very groups he uses. This combined appropriation, assimilation, and heroic evasion is consistently foregrounded in the film. Finally, I ask questions about the limitations of Dundee’s border crossings as they relate to the construction of the westem hero, but I also ask questions about the limitations of the film’s self-conscious treatment thereof. Major Dundee is a deliberately reflexive film about power struggle and egomaniacal obsession. Its reflexivity artistically frames the continual arguing that marred the movie’s creation, but this reflexivity also reveals the film’s skepticism about the white hero’s ability to speak for multiple cultural interests. Chapter Five revisits Sam Peckinpah through a film over which he claimed to have a great deal of artistic control: The Wild Bunch (1969). Critics have approached the politics of The Wild Bunch as a reflection or critique of U.S. policy in Vietnam, but the film also reflects a more general politics of race and gender intertwined with a dual idealism and skepticism about the heroic potential of the westem hero to facilitate a revolutionary consciousness. The interest in revolutionary outlawry that informs both Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch speaks to the director’s interest in redefining the hero in explicitly political terms but also to his anxiety about the political potential of himself and his heroes. 44 Peckinpah, like his outlaw heroes, publicly evaded explicit political engagement, which leads many to simply call the director apolitical or even reactionary, but the importance that The Wild Bunch attributes to its outlaws’ political engagement with the revolutionary allies of Pancho Villa merits a closer reading. In both Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah uses Mexican femininity to symbolize the possibility of political engagement for the male heroes. In The Wild Bunch the feminine image is central to the backstory of the hero Pike Bishop’s (William Holden) guilt and central to the bunch’s potential political commitment to the agrarian rebels of Mexico. The explicit misogyny of the heroes’ behaviors in the film speaks to their own failures and makes ironic their apparent political reawakening at the end of the film. Addressing the generic heroism in the film, critic John Cawelti (1978) describes “the destraction and reaffirmation of myth,’’ and Rita Parks (1982) calls Peckinpah’s vision “The Hero Remythologized” (115). But the ending of The Wild Bunch is full of ironies about the heroic potential of its heroes, so a better place to locate the limitations of the film is not in its affirmation of heroic myth but in its critique of heroic reluctance, wherein Peckinpah easily imagines the limitations of the westem hero but fails to imagine any direction for the westem beyond these limitations. Chapter Six is a reading of westem imagery in the music of Bob Dylan. Easily one of the most politically significant artists of the decade, Dylan was also an artist terrified of playing the heroic voice of a generation. Dylan’s songs are full of political commitment tempered by a reluctance to lead, and his westem heroes embody this dual impulse. Dylan’s songs participate in folk song tradition by reclaiming the westem hero-types celebrated by his political and musical influences, e.g.. Woody Guthrie, but Dylan’s use of these conventional heroes foregrounds an ironic celebration of their sociopolitical heroic potential and an artist’s anxiety about his image as sociopolitical leader. In this chapter I read Dylan’s westem heroes as commentaries on his ongoing contentious relationship with the leftist political movements of the time. Finally, Chapter Seven concludes the dissertation with a reading of Dylan’s 1970s westem songs and of the film Pat Garrett and Biliv the Kid (1973). Dylan’s songs “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (1975) and “Romance in Durango” (1976) explore the self-interest and failure of their westem heroes, and I offer these readings as a postscript to 45 the Dylan chapter and a primer for my reading of Pat Garrett. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, Pat Garrett includes themes already established in my readings of Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch, but the film also self-consciously employs the iconographies of Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson to a degree that draws specific attention to the compatibili^ of Peckinpah’s westem hero with the late 1960s and early 1970s music counterculture. Combining insights from my readings of Peckinpah and Dylan, my conclusion suggests limitations of and alternatives to an author-based approach, and I ask questions about the merits of reading the star iconography of the westem actor in sociopolitical terms.

46 CHAPTER!

EQUALIZERS AND OUTCASTS: FROM “PROBLEM PLOT” TO RELUCTANT HERO

This chapter begins with a discussion of the most explicit variety of sociopolitical material in the westems of the 1950s and 1960s: the “problem plot.” The problem plot was perhaps always recognized by viewers and critics for its social and political themes and, therefore, merits discussion here, if only by way of introduction to more subtle sociopolitical subcategories of the westem. After briefly defining the problem plot, which itself frequently revolves around the westem hero’s ability to mediate social crises, I will describe and analyze more subtle anxieties about the westem hero. The anxieties I will discuss reveal dominant cultural anxieties at large and questions about the efficacy of genre heroes for solving complex social problems. I argue first that the emergence of morally ambiguous and reluctant heroes in the late 1950s reveals Americans’ growing love-hate relationship with the westem hero and the hero’s love-hate relationship with his work. Americans’ ambivalence about the hero and the hero’s reluctance about his work are partly attributable to fears regarding the violence and chaos the westem hero represents to the social order. But another element of the culture’s ambivalence and hero’s reluctance has more specific sociopolitical applications insofar as the hero’s attempts to mediate diverse gender, racial, and regional constituencies contributes to a redefinition of westem heroism as particularly “dirty work.” Will Wright’s terms “Professional Plot” and “Transition Theme” are good starting places for understanding a growing rift between the hero and both his diegetic and real-world society, and I revisit these terms later in the chapter. But neither of Wright’s terms adequately accounts for both the hero’s reluctance and his increasing status as social undesirable.

47 While I concentrate here on the television westem, this chapter is intended as an introduction to the themes of heroic reluctance I explore throughout the dissertation. Therefore, I advise my readers to consider the following chapter not as a series of universal claims about the television westem but rather as a preface to themes of reluctant heroism in general. Toward the end of the chapter I ask questions about the limitations of ^proaching the westem as sociopolitical allegory too strictly, and I discuss the merits of reading more sociopolitically open-ended westems in the context of their sociopolitical milieu. Most important to the dissertation, however, are the three types of reluctance that I define in the last section of the chapter (1) the hero resists assimilating into a cormpt and inequitable society that holds him and others in servitude; (2) the hero resists believing that this corrupt and inequitable society can be changed; (3) getue producers resist imagining the westem hero as compatible with revolutionary change, though they consistently thmst this hero into sociopolitic^y charged situations that test his sociopolitical potential. The goal is to better define the reluctant hero, what some have called the “anti-hero,” in a more specific sociopolitical context without neglecting to discuss the reasons why the diegetic and real-world sociopolitical consequences of these heroes' actions are often deliberately vague.

“HEY BOY’S REVENGE AVERTED”: THE ADULT WESTERN AND THE PROBLEM PLOT

No analysis of the 1960s westem would be complete without some reference to television. With television programmers scrambling to find material for the new medium, it was perhaps inevitable that in 1949 B-movie hero Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd) and radio’s The Lone Ranger would hit the small screen, the perfect new medium for reaching

48 juvenile audiences in their homes (Yoggy 5-18).^ These shows ushered in a decade of western television that with the debut of Gunsmoke (1955) exploded into 18 new television westems in 1958, “when 12 of the top 25 Nielsen-rated shows were Westems, including a phenomenal seven in the top ten” (1). The television westem reached the zenith of its popularly in the late 1950s, but television left its mark on the 1960s westem at large in notable ways. The claustrophobic settings and concentration on method acting over cinematic grandeur in Arthur Penn’s The Left-Handed Gun (1958) and Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963) owe something to these directors’ years in 1950s television. Both men went on to become major directors in the 1960s, and both men made westems. Moreover, television also transformed film and literary westems in more material ways. The small screen inspired widescreen formats in films struggling to compete, making the epic scope of film westems even more grand, and competition from television debilitated the pulp westem market in the 1960s, accounting for transformations in the work of writers like Elmore Leonard. Most interesting for my purposes, however, is that television provided a venue for the “adult westem.” Beginning in the 1940s and early 1950s with a number of film westems including The Outlaw (19431. Duel in the Sun ('19461. The Gunfighter n950i. High Noon (19521 and Shane (1953), the adult westem introduced more explicit treatments of sex, violence, and other adult themes to a country darkened by World War n and the Cold War. Intertwined with this interest in adult themes were adult problems or “problem plots,” frequently defined in terms of race matters and regional divisions challenging American faith in democracy. Gunsmoke brought the adult westem and the problem plot to the small screen in a big way, and other shows quickly followed. A 1959 Time Magazine article entitled “The Six-Gun Galahad” describes the adult westem of the era and reveals the genre’s interest in mining specific sociopolitical contexts for plots: The new horse operas are genetically known as adult Westems, a term first used to describe the shambling, down-to-biscuits realism of “Gunsmoke”, but there are numerous subspecies. First came the psychological half-breeds, paranoid bluecoats, and amnesic prospectors. Then there was the Civil Rights Westem and

^ Yogpv’s Riding the Video Range (19951 is a comprehensive source on the television westem. In addition to citing Yoggy throughout this section, I have used his book to check and double-check dates of specific television westems and series. 49 all the persecuted Piutes, molested Mexicans, downtrodden Jewish drummers and tormented Chinese laundrymen had their day. Scriptwriters are now riding farther from the train, rustling plots from De Maupassant, Stevenson, even Aristophanes, introducing foreigiiers and dabbling in r ^ , incest, miscegenation, and cannibalism, (qtd. in Yoggy 77-78) This quotation is quite revealing, with its hodgepodge of classic authors, sociopolitically germane plots, and gothic sensationalism. The juxtaposition of salient 1950s issues like racism with lurid mainstays like cannibalism reveals the writer’s cynicism about the western’s sociopolitical interests. It is hard to say whether this cynicism is bom in the writer’s reactionary conservatism or in the writer’s sense of the potentially exploitative compartmentalization of sociopolitical realities into problem plots. What is clear is that by 1959 at least some television viewers recognized the adult western’s growing interest in sociopolitical material. Television’s problem plots find precedent in the problem pictures of Hollywood. These pictures were no doubt the product of a recognition of the unfathomably destructive potential of racism revealed in the genocidal wake of Nazism. Accordingly, these problem pictures form a commercially successful and well-meaning cycle of films about racism that are occasionally harrowing but often patronizing, didactic, and superficial in their conclusions. Beginning with the racial subtext of big Hollywood films like Lifeboat (1944), this cycle continues through the mixed blessings of Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947); Lost Boundaries. Pinkv. Intruder in the Dust and Home of the Brave (1949); The Steel Helmet ('19501: China Gate (1957); The Defiant Ones and Imitation of Life (1959); A Raisin in the Sun (1961); The Pawnbroker (19651: and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). There are also independent films like Shadows (1961), The Cool World ('19631. Portrait of Jason ('19671. and La Permission/The Storv of a Three Day Pass (1968). Moreover, and perhaps most significant to this study, a number of cinema’s problem pictures are westems of the often patronizing “pro-Indian” cycle or, less often, of a cycle of westems dealing with discrimination against African Americans: e.g.. Devil’s Doorwav and Broken Arrow ('19501: Arrowhead (1953); Hondo and Apache f 19541: The Searchers ('19561: Run of the Arrow (1957); The Lone Ranger and the Lost Citv of Gold (1958); Sergeant Rutledge. Flaming Star, and The Unforgiven (1960); Chevenne Autumn

50 (1964); Maf or Dundee (1965); Hombre (1967): The Scalphunters (1968); Tell Them Willie Bov is Here (1969); A Man Called Horse. Little Big Man. Soldier Blue, and The Last Warrior (1970); Billv Jack (1971); Buck and the Preacher. The Legend of Nigger Charley. and When the Legends Die (1972)^

On television, shows like The Lone Ranger (1949-1957), Brave Eagle (1955- 1956), and Broken Arrow 0956-19581 and made-for-television movies like I Will Fipht No More Forever (1975) explored American Indian issues with a degree of sympathy, but, as the Time Magazine review of the adult westems suggests, many of the most explicit sociopolitical engagements were in individual characters and episodes on many of the era's television shows. On Gunsmoke. for example, the “half-breed” character Quint Asper (Burt Reynolds) came to Dodge during the 1962 season and occasioned a number of scripts about racial prejudice: Several outstanding scripts dealing with bigotry toward half-breeds and Indians were written by Kathleen Hite (“(p in t’s Trail,” “Comanches Is Soft,” and “Quint- Cident”—a variation on [the “Get your filthy hands off my daughter”] theme, where Quint must deal with the wrath of a woman spumed) and one by Les Cmtchfield (“Crooked Mile”). (Yoggy 116) In these and other problem plots of television westems, as in any number of Hollywood problem pictures, it is not unusual for the show’s white hero to stick up for the racial “outsider,” mediating the relationship between the character of color and the white community and standing as a liberal and often patronizing example of tolerance and open- mindedness. In “Quint Asper Comes Home,” for example. Marshal Dillon (James Araess) both subdues Quint’s rage over white men’s murder of his father and ameliorates Quint’s relationship with white people to facilitate his entrance into the community of Dodge (114). In “Hey Boy’s Revenge” (1958), an episode of the adult westem Have Gun. Will Travel, gunfighter hero Paladin (Richard Boone) helps his Chinese American friend Hey Boy (Kam Tong) get out of jail after Hey Boy is imprisoned for investigating the murder of his activist brother by white railroad men. The episode’s plot starts with the activism of

® For a more detailed discussion of the history of the Native American image in film from a Native perspective see Ward Churchill’s Fantasies of the Master Race (1992,1998). For a discussion of the problem picture from an African American perspective se e Donald Bogle’s Toms. Coons. Mulattoes. Mammies, and Bucks (1973,1994). 51 Hey Boy and his brother, but the Chinese eventually are treated as impossible heroes requiring the calm strength of Caucasian gunfighter Paladin. Paladin, a sophisticated hero in the tradition of Maverick and, later. The Wild Wild West, is part sly, hard-boiled detective and part James Bond, agreeing to take money to protect the murderer even as he sets him up for a confession in front of a mob of angry Chinese American workers. Much of the moral ambiguity of Paladin in “Hey Boy’s Revenge,” as well as in other episodes, hinges on the dubious heroism of his inclination to be a gun for hire, but Hey Boy himself is not afforded so much depth. As his servant’s name suggests. Hey Boy, while inclined to lash out against the exploitation of his people, is more an object of the plot’s resolution than an agent Therefore, even as “Hey Boy’s Revenge” engages directly with issues of racial discrimination, its title might more accurately read “Hey Boy’s Revenge Averted.” With Paladin, as with Marshall Dillon, we see the gunfighter hero as mediator, and in “Hey Boy’s Revenge” this mediation is achieved without ever stepping too far outside of the Eurocentric social structure. Nonetheless, it may be premature to place Paladin in the category of superficial harbinger of law. The morally suspect nature of Paladin’s profession as gun for hire is often reconciled through his inclination to help the downtrodden, his respect for various cultures, and his ability to maintain social stability; however, his origin, as represented in the episode “Genesis” (1962), taints his sense of social responsibility even as it positions the gunfighter as sociopolitical hero. “Genesis” sidesteps the sociopolitical specificity of the problem plots involving Quint Asper and Hey Boy, but the implications regarding the social dimension of the hero in “Genesis” are significant in that the episode hints that sociopolitical responsibility is less the westem hero’s duty than his curse.

HEROISM AS CURSE AND PLAY

In the frame narrative of “Genesis,” Paladin thwarts a young man’s attempt to kill him. When he finds out that the young man has agreed to shoot him in lieu of a debt. Paladin tells the gunfighter upstart the story of his own initiation into the life of the gun. In

52 the flashback. Paladin, much like his would-be assassin, owes a gambling debt. A man named Norge (William Conrad) agrees to forgive the young Paladin’s debt in exchange for the murder of violent badman Smoke (Richard Boone), and the young hero reluctantly agrees. Heavy handed as the casting of Richard Boone in the dual roles of the young Paladin and the elder Smoke might seem, “Genesis” uses the casting thoroughly to illustrate, through the transfer of the status of alpha gunfighter from Smoke to Paladin, the fated and grim aspects of gunfighting. The casting of Boone in both roles illustrates the fated nature of Paladin’s character by suggesting that the persona of gunfighter awaits him before he even knows it, but the struggle between the two men also becomes surreal and sad as the terminally ill Smoke uses Paladin to fulflll his death wish. Smoke traps Paladin in a canyon and encourages the young gun to practice, and finally Paladin shoots his captor, only to find that Smoke was in fact the only thing keeping the corrupt Norge from wickedly exploiting the whole valley. Norge’s cruel trick and Paladin’s credulity have potentially destroyed not a menace but an outlaw hero, while defining Paladin as a badman in the service of powerful forces of oppression. In order to remedy the situation. Paladin dons Smoke’s black clothing, gun, and holster, and he confronts Norge to rid the valley of violent corruption. The implications of “Genesis” are many. First, the episode exploits the notion of the gunfighter and outlaw as victims of prejudice, for Paladin’s belief in Norge’s cause hinges on his assumption that Smoke is evil. Secondly, the episode mobilizes Smoke and then Paladin in the service of the downtrodden, as potentially good badmen in the Robin Hood mold. However, as the heroism of Smoke and, finally. Paladin simultaneously attacks prejudice and establishes the sociopolitical function of the hero as fighter of wrongs, it also suggests that heroism is a kind of curse. Paladin’s newly found social responsibility, while a noble response to the damage he has inadvertently caused, is not treated as a reward so much as a social obligation that will shackle Paladin for all his days. This is particularly evident when one recalls that the entire story-within-the-story in “Genesis” is being told as a warning. On one hand, “Genesis,” like the Hollywood westem The Gunfighter (1950), warns against the curse of a life of violence and revises the genre by suggesting that the western’s stock hero is morally darkened and socially

53 outcast by his violence. On the other hand, the hero’s social responsibility is tainted insofar as it is couched in this warning against the curse of the gun. One way to read this collusion of heroic responsibility and hero’s curse is to note that the powers of the hero to serve the disenfranchised can just as easily be exploited in the service of oppressive sociopolitical forces. This possibility reflects a world where heroism in the service of the social good must be constantly vigilant about which society is actually being served: Does the hero serve the society of the oppressed or the society of the oppressor? Another way to read this collusion of heroic responsibility and dangerous heroism, however, is to note that “Genesis” reflects a world where heroism is increasingly dirty woric. It is no mistake that “Genesis” avoids dealing with the oppression of a specific group, like the Chinese Americans in “Hey Boy’s Revenge,” for the suggestion in “Genesis” that the hero is cursed by social responsibility and always dangerously close to being an agent of oppression would, if tied specifically to a racial group, imply the hero’s racism and seriously question the hero’s ability to serve as an effective agent for an anti­ racist politics. Therefore, the celebration of the hero’s sociopolitical potential and critique of the hero as dangerous and reluctant is spread across two plot types. First, the problem plot, with its specified group of disenfranchised people, gets the pat ending in order not to alienate specific groups of viewers more aware of the debilitating realities of sociopolitical discrimination and exclusion or challenge a white audience with the true villainy of white privilege. The second plot, however, explores the hero’s reluctance to rise to a heroic calling and betrays serious doubts about the sociopolitical interests of the hero. The problem plot is easily attributable to the sociopolitical concerns of the text’s milieu and the conservative fear of addressing these concerns outside of the framework of resolutions compatible with the stability of the status quo. The latter, more ambivalent plot, however, is attributable to myriad, often contradictory, factors. One of these factors may simply be that the conventions of the westem hero in general, e.g., his violent propensity for direct action and his frequent distrust of society, are central to his capability to inspire social change but are also a constant threat to social stability. Keeping this first factor in mind, it is fitting that many westems, particularly in an era where the potential for massive social upheaval is increasingly the subject of popular discourse, fall back on

54 notions of outlaw and gunfighter heroism as play. Comic episodes of Maverick and The Restless Gun, for example, show characters playing at being outlaws and gunfighters in an attempt not only to parody the genre but also to replay a popular model of heroic action without having to face its dangers. In the “Duel at Sundown” (1959) episode of Maverick, mediocre gunfighter and brilliant confidence man Bret Maverick (James Gamer) is asked by a friend to save his daughter from marrying a brutal and lazy gunfighter (Clint Eastwood). Clearly outgunned and repeatedly hazed by the gunslinging beau, who tauntingly calls the hero “Mav-err- aaack,” Bret sets up a con in which he is called out by legendary mankiller John Wesley Hardin. When Bret apparently kills Hardin, the gunslinging beau deserts town, revealing that, gunfighting expertise aside, he is a coward. Of course, Bret only pretends to shoot Hardin, and Hardin is really Bret's equally ornery brother Bart (Jack Kelly). In the episode’s comic last word, the Maverick brothers leave town and encounter a man on the trail who claims to be the real Wes Hardin on his way to town to kill the impostor who has been using his name. The episode ends with Bret and Bart turning suitably pale. Consistently on Maverick, the masculinity of Bret, Bart, and, later, brother Beau (played by future James Bond, Roger Moore) is defined not through their ability to fight but rather through their ability to avoid fighting. The suave demeanor of the Maverick brothers mirrors the well-dressed worldliness of Paladin and sets the stage for the later heroes of The Wild Wild West, and all of these heroes redefine heroism as mental rather than physical. These heroes parody the conventions of the westem hero for an era buried in the hackneyed bravado of the genre. However, play is not solely parody, for “Duel at Sundown” suggests that the image of the gunfighter, even when a sham, carries with it the potential to effect social change. In “Duel at Sundown” the phony gunfighter Maverick unveils the cowardice lurking beneath the show of the real gunfighter, and, by doing so, rids a family and a town of a dangerous menace. Unlike “Genesis,” the story of “Duel at Sundown” is playful and comic, but the comic nature of the episode thinly masks many of the same anxieties about heroism as those underlying “Genesis.” “Duel at Sundown” reveals the social value of the gunfighter image to the diegetic town insofar as Bret and

55 Bart’s performance rids the town of a dangerous man, but it also criticizes the male bravado and violence of the character played by Clint Eastwood as representing a potential menace. Like Have Gun. Will Travel’s “Genesis,” the “Duel at Sundown” episode of Maverick is also remarkable for its lack of a sociopolitically specific problem plot, but this very evasion of specificity lends the episode much of its ideological strength. For example, “Duel at Sundown” provides a palatable model of masculinity for the decade of “the man in the gray flarmel suit” and for the Eastern heroism of President Kennedy, a leader of action but also of thought As much as any good spy story, “Duel at Sundown” reflects a world where vigilance and cunning are required to uncover deception and false heroes; therefore, the episode is the perfect fit for an era of Cold War paranoia. Moreover, the suggestion that violent conflicts can be solved with a non-violent show of force perfectly fits an era of passive resistance and terror of violent federal intervention in the South. Therefore, that the playful episode lacks sociopolitical specificity is not a sign of political apathy so much as it is a sign of political concern, an attempt to celebrate the genre hero’s ability to solve social problems without celebrating the violence at the heart of the westerner’s image. In “One on the House” (1959), an episode of The Restless Gun, the importance of playing the hero is even more pronounced than in “Duel at Sundown.” The Restless Gun stars John Payne as Vint Bonner, a wandering gunfighter. As Ronald Jackson describes him in Classic TV Westerns (1994), “Bonner had a fearsome reputation as the fastest gunslinger during the postwar era but actually loathed violence” (80). Certainly, one of the reasons Bonner “loathed violence” might be that television censors did as well, even as the adult westem often defined “adult” as “more violent.” Ralph and Donna Brauer write: During the period of the adult Westem there is an interesting pattern to the violence ratio. The early shows, Earp included, de-emphasize killing much in the fashion of the horse Westems. During a testimony before a Congressional Committee investigating TV violence, Hugh O’Brien, who played Wyatt Earp, was proud of the fact that his show had de-emphasized killing. Other shows have less to be proud of. As more shows hit the air and the ratings race between the oaters became more vicious, so did the violence. It was almost as though the networks figured the best way to be “adult” and to attract more viewers was to increase the violence. In one episode of Colt .45 we counted three vicious killings and several beatings—all this in a half-hour show, including commercials. (56) 56 This quotation reveals the ways in which violence was used as a ratings ploy, but it also explains the good reasons for a show to find ways to only play at the inevitable violence working behind the genre, i.e., as a means of pleasing censors and positioning the show against other adult westems with a simultaneous celebration and avoidance of certain conventions of the westem. “One on the House” exemplifies this celebration and avoidance of violent westem heroism in its story of an old outlaw named Matt Harper (Henry Hull). Harper, a master thief and demolitions man, is pardoned and released with $3,000 indemnity after serving ten years for one robbery he actually did not commit. When Bonner meets Harper on the road, he is taken with the old man, but, like so many people in a world that has passed Harper by, Boimer finds it “hard to believe he was ever an outlaw.” Out of a sense of injustice over his false imprisonment and just to prove you are never too old to break a safe. Harper spends his time gathering nitroglycerin and measuring a safe in a crowded bank. “I figure I got one job owed me,” he proclaims. Bonner, after recalling that he helped send Harper up for the crime he did not commit, also decides that he and society owe Harper a free robbery, and he finally convinces the bank to let Harper steal his own $3,000 from the safe, while Bonner and townspeople wait like anxious spectators outside in the dark street. A number of episodes of The Restless Gun “dramatize some social issue like women’s suffrage (‘The Suffragette’ with Ellen Corby) or child abuse (‘Multiply One Boy’) or even vegetarianism (the humorous ‘The Sweet Sisters’ with Jeanette Nolan)” (Yoggy 210). “One on the House” dramatizes the old age of a character and a genre, making its goals both social and generic, but it also reveals a tension regarding the outlaw hero that is inseparably sociopolitical and generic. “One on the House” is a tenderly comic tale of an old outlaw’s last hurrah and innocuous to the extreme, but the episode nevertheless reconciles opposing forces in the westem by celebrating the freedom of Matt Harper’s outlawry while avoiding its socially undesirable outcome. Like “Duel at Sundown,” the episode “One on the House” celebrates the violent westem hero but with the stipulation that the celebration should secretly remain a public performance; Bonner and

57 others watch an old outlaw have a last go ‘round as if they are watching a wild west show. “The Equalizer” (1961), an episode of The Chevenne Show featuring Bronco Layne (Ty Hardin), continues this trend of celebration and avoidance. In “The Equalizer,” federal agent Bronco is assigned the job of keeping the peace between Butch Cassidy (Steve Brodie) and Billy Doolin (Sheldon Allman) while the rival outlaws are in town celebrating the marriage of Cassidy’s niece Ella (Toby Michaels) and Doolin’s brother Bob (Jack Nicholson). Bronco soon finds a comic sidekick in Mr. “Toothy” Thompson (Jack Elam), who, it soon appears, has ulterior motives for wanting to help Bronco maintain well-balanced order. Toothy, a bitter “ugly fella,” secretly seeks revenge against Doolin and Cassidy; apparently, the two outlaws made believe they were Toothy’s friends and planted money on him, which earned Toothy two undeserved years in prison. Therefore, while Bronco struggles to keep barroom spats from turning into bloody gunfights. Toothy plays each outlaw gang against the other, instigating violence until each gang’s second in command, i.e., Cassidy’s friend Luke Mace (Donald Barry) and Doolin’s friend Dave Ward (Johnny Seven), eventually insists on violence. When Cassidy and Doolin refuse to fight, Mace and Ward succeed and join up with third party Jim Morgan (Harry Lauter). Morgan plans to rob a bank and blame it on the Cassidy and Doolin gangs, who will, Morgan predicts, kill each other denying the robbery. Eventually, Morgan, Mace, and Ward rob the bank and kidnap the young lovers, pushing the town to the brink of a bloody altercation amidst the accusations of the town and each falsely accused gang. What makes matters worse is that the instigator Toothy is the only witness to the robbery and kidnapping. Struggling to maintain diplomacy in an increasingly volatile town. Bronco listens to “Mr. Thompson’s” story about being framed by Cassidy and Doolin. Less upset about the jail time than about being treated like a social misfit by people he thought were his friends, Mr. Thompson earns Bronco’s sympathy while Bronco earns Thompson’s respect. Finally, Mr. Thompson is a moral character swayed by Bronco’s plea to think of the “innocent women and children” who will die if tempers are allowed to erupt.

58 Mr. Thompson tells the authorities and both gangs that Morgan, Mace, and Ward are to blame, and the sheriff (Frank Albertson) actually deputizes both outlaw gangs to bring in the robber kidnappers. On one level, “The Equalizer” is less about playing the outlaw than about the importance of earning society’s respect The story of the outcast Toothy’s transformation from bitter instigator to goofy town hero is comic, but this story is also a socially safe model for an outcast’s assimilation into society and, therefore, resembles the assimilationism at the heart of more explicit problem plots. Toothy’s struggle is accented by advertisements for Lucky Strike cigarettes and GL-70 tooth paste that run throughout the show promoting an image of masculinity that is conversely rugged and easy on the eyes and promoting products that can help someone like Toothy achieve this image. Bronco himself is no “ugly fella” but rather, like President Kennedy, a dashing young man both accessible and heroic, playing ombudsman to forces that, like the Cold War and domestic conflict in the South, must be kept in careful balance. “The Equalizer” resembles early 1960s foreign and domestic policy and foregrounds the importance of the outlaw ethos to the social structure. It is made clear early in the episode that the union of Ella and Bob is more than just a wedding; rather, it is a source of town revenue both because of the renown of the outlaw families involved and because of the Romeo and Juliet drama of the union. With this in mind, the deputizing of the Cassidy and Doolin gangs represents an acknowledgement of the importance of the outlaw image even as in waters down the outlaws’ threat to society. As is the case in the episodes of Maverick and The Restless Gun, the outlaw style in “The Equalizer” is both celebrated and avoided, or rather taken into the fold of social legitimacy. Meanwhile, Bronco stands at the border with the rival gangs and the outcast Toothy to mediate the entrance of all into the society of the town. Therefore, on another level, “The Equalizer” is about playing the hero insofar as Bronco’s image as able gunfighter is his constant source of authority over the outlaw gangs. Furthermore, the element of play is important insofar as the gangs themselves are an economically significant feature of the town, and they become heroic when their violence is tempered and rearticulated in the service of law and order.

59 Images of westem heroism as curse and as play differ more in mood than in generic and sociopolitical motivation. Generically, both images of the westem hero reflect an era still receptive to westem heroism but uneasy about the potential outcomes of this heroism. It is in this uneasiness about the outcomes of westem heroism that one finds potential sociopolitical motivations on the part of producers. Periiaps the most salient of these sociopolitical motivations grows out of a fear of violence, a fear particularly acute in the medium of television with its pervasiveness in the home. The fear of violence, however, has more specific implications for an era faced with threats of violence both abroad and on American soil, and part of the shift to westem heroes who play at fighting for what is right reflects a shift to a democracy faced with its own limitations and on the brink of violent revolution. Westem heroism as curse in particular betrays social anxieties about the outcomes of heroic intervention. Specifically, the curse of westem heroism reflects a white, masculinist culture’s growing sense that heroic responsibility may mean ridding the town of a more pervasive social evil than it bargains for, that for every exploitative character like the bully Norge in “Genesis” there are hundreds more lurking behind comers in other towns. The preceding examples reveal that beyond the explicit problem plot other television plots explore the reluctance of westem heroes and a society’s reluctance about westem heroes. This is not to say, however, that Have Gun. Will Travel’s “Genesis,” Maverick’s “Duel at Sundown,” The Restless Gun’s “One on the House,” or The Chevenne Show’s “The Equalizer” are antithetical to the problem plot. Quite the contrary, all four episodes deal with the problem of social prejudice, and all four define social prejudice as aimed at gunfighters or outlaws. Furthermore, of the four, only “Duel at Sundown” validates the town’s fear of the gunfighter. The others temper this fear with messages of tolerance: “Genesis” undermines the notion that gunfighter Smoke is evil, “One on the House” claims that a little outlawry is permissible, and “The Equalizer” shows that the Cassidy and Doolin gangs, like the outcast Toothy, can serve socially beneficial ends. In each case, however, outlaw and outcast characters are assimilated into society in some way. In “Genesis” the potential badman Paladin must make good by ridding the valley of Norge. In “One on the House” the old bandit’s robbery is only acceptable as a show for Bonner and the others. 60 And in “The Equalizer,” a well-named episode, Cassidy and Doolin must be deputized in the service of the law, balancing outlaw violence and social order. Therefore, as these plots centering around outlaw and gunfighter heroes skirt the explicit sociopolitical issues addressed in the problem plot, the redemption and assimilation of outlaws and gunfighters themselves serve as models for dealing with society’s outsiders. The concentration on the westem hero as outsider intensifies in the late 1950s television westem. This concentration on the hero himself as outsider often has a great deal to do with his ability to mediate tensions between dominant society and social outsiders; for instance. Bronco facilitates the assimilation of the Cassidy and Doolin gangs primarily because he earns their respect as a gunfighter himself. Bronco, however, is a watered-down example of the outsider status achieved by other heroes of the time. In his study of the the television westem. Riding the Video Range (1995), Gary A. Yoggy bases his chapter “Bounty Hunters, Gamblers and Hired Guns: The Antihero in the Television Westem” primarily on three westems with particularly suspect heroes: Two of the Westems that debuted [in 1957] broke the mold of the traditional cowboy hero, introducing central characters who were guided more by their own self-interest than by any “mythical code of the West.” The Maverick brothers, who would rather run than fight, were professional con-men and gamblers. Paladin, whose business cards read “Have Gun Will Travel.” was a professional gunfighter who sold his services to the highest bidder. Joining them at the top of the Nielson ratings one season later was bounty hunter Josh Randall, who in Wanted: Dead or Alive seemed to be less interested in upholding the law than in collecting a sizable reward for his efforts. Thus did the antihero come to television’s make-believe West—in the guise of gamblers, hired guns and bounty hunters. (233) As the “Genesis” episode in particular indicates. Paladin’s curse to never live outside of a life of violence is intertwined with his social responsibility. As his name’s association with knight errantry indicates. Paladin is a noble crusader but also a wandering social misfit. One might argue, then, that it is partly due to his inability to fit neatly into society that Paladin can empathize with a racial outsider like Hey Boy. But the show’s inclination to center Paladin as outsider in “Genesis” simultaneously displaces more explicit sociopolitical contexts like race in favor of using the hero as both victim of social prejudice (e.g., the character Smoke) and agent against social prejudice. In the following section I look at Josh Randall (Steve McQueen), the bounty hunter hero of Wanted: Dead or Alive.

61 with particular attention to the way in which an emphasis on the hero as victim simultaneously intimates empathy between the hero and the sociopolitically disenfranchised and displaces the concerns of the disenfranchised onto the reluctant hero.

HEROES WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE: THE RELUCTANT HERO AS SOCIAL OUTCAST AND SOCIOPOLITICAL FAILURE

How often does a foot scraping bounty hunter get a chance to die a hero’s death? —Judge Coogan (Alexander Scourby), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1959)

Maverick. Have Gun. Will Travel, and Wanted: Dead or Alive all involve professionals and, therefore, are television versions of what Will Wright calls “The Professional Plot,” but their professionalism is only part of their function as heroes. Using the films Rio Bravo (1959), The Professionals (1966), The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidv and the Sundance Kid (1969), and True Grit (1969) as his primary examples, Wright describes “Professional Plot” heroes as “professional fighters, men willing to defend society only as a job they accept for pay or for love of fighting, not from commitment to ideas of law and justice” (85). He adds, “The social values of love, marriage, family, peace, and business are things to be avoided, not goals to be won. As a result, the relations of the heroes, or of the villains, with society are minimal” (85-86). This professional mold ostensibly fits television’s Josh Randall in Wanted: Dead or Alive. a gun for hire and a professional endlessly suspicious of the representatives of law and society who pay him, but Wright’s assumption that the relations between Randall and society is limited merits further exploration. The epigraph for this section, quoted from “The Hostage” (1959) episode of Wanted: Dead or Alive, illustrates the way in which the professionalism of the hero may actually be less important to the plot than the way his profession is used to class him as a social undesirable. In fact, an overemphasis on the professional characteristics of a hero like Josh Randall ignores the general value of his liminality in a moment of increasing distrust in government, law, normalcy, and the social “good.” 62 Randall, Paladin, The Rebel Johnny Yuma, Bronco. The Restless Gun. The Loner. and, eventually, Kung Fu’s Kane, form a band of misfits that wandered the United States’ small screens from the late 1950s through the 1970s, exempli^ing anxieties about the relationship between westem heroes and society. The diversity, or lack thereof, of this band of misfits and their numerous adventures reflects larger anxieties about the limits of social conformity, the stakes of nonconformity, and the complexities of applying rebel heroism to 1950s and 1960s news makers as diverse as segregationist governor Orval Faubus, Communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, playboy Hugh Hefftier, Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks, feminist Betty Friedan, Black Power founder Bobby Seale, and psychopath Charles Manson. Taking Randall from Wanted: Dead or Alive as an example, it is clear that part of this hero’s generic purpose is to be distrusted, misused, abused, and reviled by the very social structure he helps to protect Randall is quite aware of the division between bounty hunter and society, and he approaches his work with an understandable reluctance. Randall struggles to not be assimilated into an increasingly corrupt and inequitable society, and his fear of assimilating leads him to define his heroism on his own terms, outside of the morally bankrupt system of official law. The hero’s struggle no doubt mirrors the struggles of any number of sociopolitically disenfranchised groups. Therefore, with the episode “The Hostage” (1959) I will show that Randall’s status as victim of social injustice creates a bond between the hero and the female character Julie (Marcia Henderson), who suffers unjust treatment by the town patriarchy. I will also show, however, that the episode displaces Julie’s disenfranchisement and her ability to do something about it by ultimately giving the westem hero all the options. The westem hero stands in for Julie’s frustrations, but her frustrations are eventually displaced by the hero’s escape from a corrupt system, where she is left to fend for herself. In “The Hostage,” Randall brings in outlaw Jumbo Kane (Lee Van Cleef), but Kane promptly takes the Sheriff (Tyler McVey) hostage, wounding him. When Kane demands a hostage who can walk, to use as a shield as he leaves the town. Judge Coogan proposes offering the bounty hunter as an additional hostage: “How often does a foot scraping bounty hunter get a chance to die a hero’s death?” Coogan himself cowers in the 63 face of Kane’s threats to kill him, and the judge’s interest in martyring Randall barely conceals his own cowardice. The judge’s obvious plan for picking Randall is that the bounty hunter can be sacrificed when the judge orders townspeople to snipe Kane. It also becomes obvious that Judge Coogan would sacrifice the sheriff to save his own skin, despite the protests of Sheriff Taggert’s daughter Julie, who, early in the episode, shouts at the judge, “You don’t care whether my father lives or dies.” “The Hostage” is a exercise in good and bad intentions. Julie is motivated by her desire to see her father alive and, therefore, stands in contrast with Coogan, a self- interested coward. Other men from town, much like Coogan, use excuses to back out of being the hostage-e.g., “if I wasn’t a family man and all”—so Julie’s intentions seem purer than theirs as well. Nevertheless, despite Julie’s superior motivations, her interest in her father’s life leaves her begrudgingly sympathetic to Coogan’s plan to use Randall as a hostage. Therefore, a central question driving the plot of “The Hostage” is whether Julie will side with Randall or the town. When Julie objects to Coogan’s forcing Randall, at gunpoint, into Kane’s custody, she is asked if she prefers her “father’s life or the life of a bounty hunter.” Consistently, the most important thing about Randall’s profession is that he is seen as expendable. As Coogan argues, “Who’s more important to this town? Our faithful sheriff, or a bounty hunter who hasn’t done a thing for the citizens of Rogue City? If Randall’s in the way that’s his hard luck!” It is no mistake that Coogan appeals to Julie first on the grounds of family and then on the grounds of social authority. Sheriff Taggert, like the town’s cowards, is a “family man,” but he is also the Sheriff. The family patriarch and the legal patriarch fuse in a double appeal, as social order is tied to both family and the town’s political hierarchy. Julie is motivated by a sense of family, but she is left with limited choices, since to choose her family over a drifter she must choose Coogan’s hierarchy over Randall’s character, and she knows Coogan values his own life more than her father’s. Randall’s conflict, unlike Julie’s, has less to do with limited options than with his status as expendable public servant. Increasingly, the bounty hunter who works for the town realizes that he and Kane occupy a similar social category. When Kane tells Randall, “Come on, bounty hunter. We’re going out in public,” it becomes evident that Kane and

64 Randall aie alike insofar as neither is safe “in public.” Randall acknowledges his exclusion from the public and points out to Kane that he has been given a dummy hostage. Kane kids himself into thinking he has a good hostage: “You brought me here, remember. You’re the big hero in this cmmmy town.” Randall, however, fearing that he will be shot in the ambush outside, disillusions Kane: “Things have changed.” In one telling moment, Randall explains to Kane, and himself, “They want you dead, but they want that Sheriff alive [mostly because Julie insists], and they don’t much care about me.” Then, recognizing that the sheriff is dead and that it is only a matter of time before the townspeople find out, Randall tells Kane, “One hostage is deadand... I’m not gonna do you any good.” After Randall notes, “They’re not just pointing at you now. They’re pointing at us,” Kane tries to make an alliance with the bounty hunter. Kane, finally getting the point, argues, “You and me are on the same team.” However, this offer of friendship is ultimately rejected by Randall. While Randall acknowledges his kinship with the outlaw for the sake of self-preservation, he is tom between the knowledge that he is expendable and his loathing of being associated with the murderous Kane: Randall: “If I tell 'em the sheriffs dead. I’m on their side.” Kane: “And they’ll cut you to pieces to get to me. You said so yourself.” Randall: “And if I tell the sheriffs alive, that puts me on your side. Either way I end up with dirt on my face.” Randall pauses, and then yells, “He’s dead and he’s been dead all along!” Randall’s decision articulates the important difference between his values and Kane’s values, a difference that Wright’s description of the professional westemer might rationalize by noting “the distinction between ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs,’ or more exactly between professional individualism and social conformity, professional values and money values” (115). But if the professional model here affords an explanation for the hero’s individualism, and if Randall is finally more competent than the other men in the town, the word “professionalism” is also distracting when applied to “The Hostage.” In the professional westem Rio Bravo (1959) John Wayne must help a drunken sheriff (Dean Martin) to rediscover his professional responsibilities, but in “The Hostage” Randall’s affirmation of the value of the bounty hunter functions most obviously as a repudiation of

65 Coogan’s social order. Randall’s heroism does more than privilege professional values over money values. Rather, “The Hostage” seems more concerned with questioning the legitimacy of the town’s fathers of law. Randall’s decision to betray Kane is partly a concession to the values of society, but it is also a decision wrought with irony in that his decision proves Coogan’s chauvinistic assumptions of his own superiority to be fraudulent Randall proves the town father’s bigotry and error by showing the “foot scraping bounty hunter” to be a bigger person than the judge’s facade of robes and law. Therefore, Randall, while ostensibly siding with Coogan’s law, actually manages to dissociate himself from Kane and Coogan at the same time. In many ways Randall’s heroism may be better described by Wright’s “Transition Theme” than his “Professional Plot” According to Wright the ‘Transition Theme” is exemplified by characters like the hero (James Stewart) or Broken Arrow (19501. who sympathizes with the Apaches and suffers for it. These heroes find themselves outside of society (i.e., white society) at the end of the film, usually because of their sympathy for a disenfranchised group (74). But “The Hostage” complicates this category as well, because Randall himself appears to be the disenfranchised character, and neither the ‘Transition Theme” nor the “Professional Plot” adequately explains Randall’s disenfranchisement or his reluctance to serve. While Randall seems to share a bond with Julie in that both are unjustly treated by Coogan’s law, their alliance dissolves with Julie’s decision in the end to believe Kane over Randall. At the end of “The Hostage,” Kane convinces Julie that Randall has lied and her father is still alive. When he brings her father’s corpse outside, she mshes the jail, Randall tackles Kane, and Julie shoots the outlaw. Unlike High Noon, where the girl affirms the westerner’s values (i.e., the necessity of violent action) by shooting an outlaw, Julie’s action is not affirmative. She never really sides with Randall, though she and Randall finally stand together in a fray with Kane as the town stares, and the episode’s particularly cynical implication is that Julie, the other disenfranchised character, fails to trust Randall because she has bought into Coogan’s stereotype that Randall lacks moral character.

66 Therefore, unlike Wright’s ‘Transition Theme,” where the hero is outcast by his alliance with a disenfranchised group, “The Hostage” actually manages to displace Julie’s disenfranchisement by having her side with the town against Randall. Offered the job of the town’s “new law man” along with the friendship of the town, Randall refuses, saying, “Depends what you mean by friends. Sometimes an enemy’s a lot easier to recognize.” Randall’s final comment is a refusal to be fenced in and a pretext for his continuing to wander into another show and another conflict, but his motivation, given the events of the episode, is more than independence. “The Hostage” ends with a cold distrust of society and its laws, where not even Julie, whose motives seem selfless compared to the rest of the town, can reconcile the bounty hunter and the social contract. Randall’s refusal to stay in town is both an escape from social corruption and an escape from social responsibility. Randall gets to be the social outcast turned hero unwilling to assimilate into a corrupt society, but he achieves this heroism without really fixing the town and without really helping Julie. Randall models an anti-assimilationist heroism in that he refuses to accept Coogan’s law and lives by his own terms, but Randall’s heroism is also detached from a genuine potential for sociopolitical change. Most disturbingly, even though Julie is the episode’s most admirable character other than Randall, the heroine herself is trapped in the corrupt society while Randall escapes. Julie’s fate is quite dismal, and the episode affords her few options other than assimilation to Coogan’s law. Not afforded Randall’s privilege of a big speech about the enmity of the town, Julie is left a heroine in a society full of cowardice and corruption, a strong character but one doomed to constantly struggle to meike the law work.

(ANTI-)ASSIMILATIONISM, DETACHMENT, AND THE 1960S WESTERN HERO

“The Hostage” models three types of reluctance that will be explored in more detail throughout this dissertation. Two of these types of reluctance involve the hero himself, while the third type involves a growing reluctance on the part of producers of the era’s

67 westerns. Therefore, the first two types of reluctance involve the character of the hero, while the third type involves a generic self-consciousness on the part of producers. The first two of these types of reluctance are as follows: (1) the hero resists assimilating into a corrupt and inequitable society that holds him and others in servitude; (2) the hero resists believing that this corrupt and inequitable society can be changed. The hero’s frequent status as outcast in the era’s westerns and his refusal to assimilate into a society that refuses to have him on his own terms makes the western hero a perfect model for any number of disenfranchised groups of the 1950s and 1960s. This is true even when the hero is white and male, like Josh Randall, but it is especially true in the case of Elmore Leonard’s westerns where the heroes are often people of color. Therefore, the first of these models of reluctance will be central to the next chapter, in which I explore the anxieties that arise regarding assimilationism when the author revises the western hero as a biracial character raised Apache or as a Mexican American lawman. The second of these types of reluctance, however, speaks to a cynicism in the westerns of the era, wherein the outsider hero’s own quest for freedom or redemption turns solipsistic. Heroes in this second type are largely unwilling to change corrupt and inequitable sociopolitical circumstances, concentrating instead on themselves. This second type is representative of the Peckinpah hero and, therefore, is the subject of Chapters Four, Five, and Seven of the dissertation. These two types of reluctant hero are not incompatible. For example, the solipsistic Peckinpah hero often refuses to assimilate himself to corrupt forces of law and business, but this hero almost always fails to support revolutionary change. Furthermore, each of these types of heroic reluctance inform the third type of reluctance of interest in this project: (3) genre producers resist imagining the western hero as compatible with revolutionary change, though they consistently thrust this hero into sociopoliticAy charged situations that test his sociopolitical potential. Leonard, Peckinpah, and Dylan all three display this third reluctance. Leonard’s fiction does so insofar as his heroes’ refusal to assimilate fails to change their racist societies in appreciable ways. Peckinpah’s films display this reluctance in that their heroes’ choices to

68 serve revolutionary ends are always made ironic by self-serving motives. And Dylan’s music uses western heroes to symbolize disengagement from organized political groups of his era even as he celebrates these heroes’ liberatory potential. Sam Peckinpah’s westerns and Bob Dylan’s use of western imagery in song are perhaps the best examples of this third type of reluctance in that the personae of each artist are consistently inserted into their western texts, often suggesting that the artist himself is aware of his own sociopolitical limitations as cultural hero. “The Hostage” may not be so self-reflexive, but the episode, like the gunfighter as curse in Paladin’s “Genesis” story, reveals an interest in defining the hero as rebel outcast against a corrupt system without any optimism about his ability to change that system. These episodes, like much of the material I discuss in the dissertation, may be defined as revisionist for their refusal to be idealistic about their heroes. But theirs is a revisionism limited by cynicism. For example, whatever degrees of self-consciousness inform these transformations in the hero in “Genesis” and “The Hostage,” these episodes refuse to allow Julie or the valley terrorized by Norge the agency to rid the world of corruption. Instead, they focus on the reluctance of white men stuck with the dirty work of western heroism, tainting these heroes’ motives and sociopolitical possibilities without offering alternatives. Neither these television westerns nor the other westerns I explore are apolitical, but the challenge they pose to allegorical reading is that these westerns are about their own sociopolitical responsibilities more than they are about any single sociopolitical event. One way to address this challenge is to explore westerns of the era through reccurring themes of their producers. Elmore Leonard’s western fiction, for example, consistently returns to the issue of racial assimilationism and to female characters poorly served by white patriarchy. Leonard’s work also frequently explores the assimilationist anxieties of characters of color by making these characters reluctant western heroes whose heroism is always in danger of serving a racist white power structure. No single event in the history of the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement informs these texts, but these texts are clearly informed by questions at the heart of the struggles of people of color in the 1950s and 1960s to find equity on their own terms. Likewise, no single event in the history of feminism informs Leonard’s female characters, but these characters are products of an era of when the

69 conventions of the western still associate femininity with the social good but increasingly question what this social good really does for women. Both Hombie and Valdez is Coming. Leonard’s 1960s western novels, explore these issues, as do many of his short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. Leonard’s work, however, reveals less a detailed awareness of sociopolitical issues of race and gender in the era than it reveals an acute self- consciousness regarding the sociopolitics of the formula western. The next chapter explores this self-consciousness in Leonard’s work and offers observations about the state of the western hero in an era of intense race and gender redefinition.

70 CHAPTERS

MÜCHOS HOMBRES: OBSERVATIONS ON THE ELMORE LEONARD HERO

Elmore Leonard is currently best known as the writer of 1990s crime fiction that became source material for the films Get Shorty (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), and Out of Sight (1998). With the success of the film Get Shortv. from the 1990 novel, the elderly writer seemed groomed for a hip generation of movie audiences experiencing cultural history through the postmodern lens of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). Most of this audience was oblivious to the fact that Leonard spent the 1950s and 1960s writing formula westerns, but such a lack of awareness is understandable since the younger Leonard who wrote westerns as “pulp fiction” often toiled in obscurity to make ends meet. Moreover, the general public’s ignorance of Leonard’s early years is matched by a critical neglect for his western fiction. Despite the fact that Leonard’s Hombre was chosen by the Western Writers of America as one of the twenty-five best western novels of all time, and despite film adaptations of Leonard’s westerns as early as 1957, next to nothing has been written about Leonard’s western fiction (Geherin 30, Devlin x). His 1960s westerns are neither as realistic as Larry McMurtry’s Horseman. Pass Bv (1961) and The Last Picture Show (1966) nor as postmodern as contributions to the genre by E. L. Doctorow and Thomas Berger, which might account for critical neglect of Leonard’s work in a literary era emphasizing the real west and formal experimentation. But Leonard’s westerns, while ostensibly quite formulaic, are self-conscious about the sociopolitics of generic conventions in subtle and timely ways. Therefore, the following observations on

71 Leonard’s 1960s fiction are not only to address critical neglect for a great writer of westerns but also to address the self-consciousness of Leonard’s westerns, primarily through his novel Hombre (1961). Observation itself is a key to Leonard’s self-consciousness insofar as his characters struggle to observe the actions of multiracial heroes through lenses distorted by racism. In Hombre. Leonard’s finest western novel, the distorted observations of characters surrounding the multiracial hero Tres Hombres are mirrored in the first-person narration of young Carl Allen, who struggles to understand the reluctance of the hero. Tres Hombres’s reluctance to save white passengers of a stagecoach sacked by bandits articulates his refusal to be assimilated into the position of hero for insensitive racists. But this hero’s reluctance is misinterpreted through the racist lens of Allen’s narration and the observations of the others. Observation and racial assimilation become related themes as Leonard explores the racially assimilationist implications of western heroism as this heroism submits to social and generic conventions ruled by white privilege. Hombre keeps the conventions of heroic behavior self-consciously in the foreground as characters struggle to define heroism amidst racial conflict. Hombre also self-consciously explores the conventional figure of the abducted white woman in ways that both liberate the woman from racist and sexist conventions of the conventional abduction plot and scapegoat white femininity for racism. In short, the reluctance of Leonard’s hero challenges the conventions of western heroism, and Leonard’s work points to implications of heroic conventions in the context of race and gender. Hombre is the first of Leonard’s 1960s novels and arguably his most important western, so it is with Hombre that I will center my reading. My analysis of Hombre accounts for the bulk of this chapter, but in order to put Hombre in critical and artistic context I begin this chapter with critical responses to Hombre and fictional sources for its interests. I have broken the chapter up into more easily digestible parts for my reader. First, I briefly summarize Hombre. Second, I summarize and discuss what few analyses of the novel exist and situate my argimient into this criticism. Unlike “The Critical Trail” mapped in the introduction to the dissertation, the criticism on Hombre amounts to little more than “A Leg of the Journey”—and the criticism on Leonard’s other westerns amounts 72 to nothing—so I have titled this brief survey accordingly. Next, I situate Hombre in Leonard’s early career, with particular emphasis on issues of race and gender that precede the novel in the author’s woric, and I point to texts after Hombre that continue its themes. Lastly, I delve into Hombre itself, concentrating on its self-conscious treatment of reluctant heroism in terms of race and gender themes.

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF HOMBRE

Hombre’s white narrator Carl Allen tells the story of Tres Hombres (a.k.a., John Russell), a man biologically Caucasian and Mexican but adopted by Apaches and sympathetic to Apache customs and suffering under U. S. imperialism. Tres Hombres, the Mexican Henry Mendez, and a coach fiill of white passengers are left to die in the desert when bandits attempt to steal money from Indian agent Dr. Favor that Favor himself has stolen from reservation meat funds. Tres Hombres foils the robbery and takes the money back for the Indians as the bandits give chase, though the other passengers assume Tres Hombres wants the money for himself. Meanwhile, the passengers look to Tres Hombres for protection from the elements and the outlaws, but Tres Hombres seemingly wants nothing to do with these racists, instead concentrating on the money. However, when the outlaws kidnap Favor’s wife Audra and threaten to kill her, Tres Hombres plays the conventional hero and dies to save her life.

A LEG OF THE JOURNEY: CRITICAL RESPONSES TO HOMBRE AND LEONARD

Leonard’s life and work as a whole have only recently inspired closer scrutiny, and I am especially indebted to Geherin (1989), Devlin (1999), and Challen (2000) for their biographies of the author. Each of these biographers touches upon Leonard’s western period, but the scope and purpose of their projects limit close analysis of individual works. 73 Roger Simon (1989) has insightfully read Leonard’s Hombre and Martin Ritt’s film version (1967), a reading I will discuss shortly, but in general Leonard’s westerns have escaped attention. More attention, however, has been paid to Martin Ritt’s film Hombre. and some of the comments critics have made regarding the film also apply to the novel. Rita Parks (1982), comparing the film to John Huston’s The Unforgiven (1960), calls Hombre “a far more powerfiil, albeit subtle, study of a racial outsider” (1(X)). This may be equally applied to the novel. Philip French (1973) notes the inevitability of the death of the hero in the film, justifying his argument with a comparison to Mailer’s “White Negro” (1957), wherein young white men identify with blackness as a symbol of existential desperation (88). This comment also may be applied to the novel, though such an application at its extreme denies that the novel and film are about people of color at all. Ward Churchill is less generous to the film than Parks or French are. In an endnote to his book Fantasies of the Master Race (1998), Churchill reads Hombre as another in a long line of stereotypical treatments of the “Good Indian,” where the Indian would like nothing better than to die to save his white master. Again, given the fact that Tres Hombres in both novel and film finally dies so that a white woman might live, this conunent is also applicable to Leonard’s novel. Less critical of the novel than Churchill is of the film, Loren D. Estleman (1987) asserts: “Leonard falls back on a LeMay tactic, allowing a fissure of fellow human feeling to appear in Russell’s dam of indifference and the tensions that have been building since the first page to burst through. Russell meets his end not at [bandit] Braden’s hands but at those of civilization ..(76). And James E. Devlin also briefly notes the “Good Indian” pattern, writing that the hero “may remind us of Fenimore Cooper’s Uncas, who also dies in defense of a race for which he has no obligation to sacrifice his life” (33). While I argue that the novel Hombre. to borrow from Parks’s reading of the film, is “a far more powerful, albeit subtle, study of a racial outsider” than many other literary, film, or television westerns of its period, Churchill is astute in reading Tres Hombres as a “Good Indian,” a conventional hero type at least as old as Fenimore Cooper and still

74 common at the time of Hombre’s release.^ However, a reading of Tres Hombres as a another “Good Indian” must take into account that both novel and film are self-conscious explorations of assimilation. This is not to absolve novel or film of racist conventions. In fact, the film’s casting of Ritt regulars Paul Newman and Martin Balsam as people of color informs Churchill’s justifiable comment that the film is largely Eurocentric. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that Leonard’s novel, in its critique of essentialist notions of heroism, foregrounds the contradictions inherent in the “heroic” death of Tres Hombres even though it plays this generic hand to its conventional conclusion. Hombre is conventional in its final insistence that Tres Hombres die saving the others, but this insistence is full of subtleties and ironies mostly lost on the other passengers, whose observations of Tres Hombres are governed by the same racist distortions driving Allen’s narrative creation of a conventional hero. Hombre is a meditation on racial difference at odds with the Eurocentric conventions of the formula western; the novel is a western with an individualist hero whose culturally constructed diversity problematizes any facile notions of individualism. Hombre critiques the cultural and political efficacy of western heroes even as it successfully uses its hero’s reluctance to critique hegemonic notions of heroism at large. The novel reveals that heroism is defined relative to the interests of those being saved and that heroism is hegemonic insofar as it serves the white characters as an affirmation of white power while forcing characters of color like Henry Mendez and Tres Hombres to assimilate. Carl Allen, like the narrators of Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949) and Larry McMurtry’s Horseman. Pass Bv (1961), struggles to learn heroic values amidst mixed signals and competing race interests, and Allen’s struggle reflects both Leonard’s tendency to problematize heroism and the 1960s interest in the limitations and possibilities of the western hero in a time of competing ideologies. Given Hombre’s interest in Allen’s observation and narration, it is fitting that the one essay-length reading of the novel I have found emphasizes narrative concerns and their relation to race. Roger Simon (1989) reads both novel and film versions of Hombre

^ For particularly unsubtle examples of the suggestion that people of color will gladly die to save white imperialists, see John Wayne’s The Alamo (1960) or his Alamo-in-Vietnam The Green Berets (1968). 75 through an approach emphasizing Bakhtinian “dialogism.” Michael Holquist’s edition of Bakhtin’s essays, TheDialogic Imagination, defines “dialogism” as “a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others” (426). Simon uses dialogism to describe Hombre at two levels: (1) the novel and film are in a dialogue with past genre texts, conditioned by and conditioning past approaches to racial meaning like the western in general and the “historical account”; (2) Allen the narrator struggles to imagine Tres Hombres, which emphasizes racial Otherness as a discursive construct of narrative. The latter of these two levels informs the former insofar as the novel’s foregrounding of the discursive relationship between narrator and racial Other revises the conventional transparency or “positivism” of the historical account genre (15). Likewise, Simon reads the film Hombre as a revision of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Specifically, Hombre gives the “power of specularization” to “those who are marginal to the group,” e.g., the “Indian” Russell; therefore, Hombre includes an American Indian perspective missing in Ford’s classic (21). Simon’s reading is thoughtful on a number of levels. First, Simon notes that the film Hombre responds to Stagecoach, a film that in its own way uses a stagecoach as a social microcosm in which to explore issues of prejudice and privilege—although I would argue that Leonard’s novel responds to Stagecoach as much as Ritt’s film does. Secondly, Simon emphasizes Allen’s narration, the chief device through which the novel explores both race and gender difference. Lastly, Simon must to some degree concentrate on Allen’s observations of Russell, since these observations are central to narration, so Simon’s analysis includes some references to looking in the novel and film. I discuss Simon’s reading at length because I concur with him on the importance of all three of these issues: (1) the allusion to Stagecoach. (2) the emphasis on narration and difference, (3) the emphasis on looking. Moreover, I especially recommend Simon’s thoughtful reading of the film, since my emphasis will be upon Leonard’s novel. However, I must depart from Simon in terms of emphasis. Simon’s emphasis on the dialogic conventions Bakhtin attributes to novels is a useful critical device for framing diversity in Leonard’s novel, but Bakhtin is hardly necessary for a discussion of diversity or genre in Hombre. Hombre’s greatest revision of the genre lies in its suggestion that 76 conventional western heroism applied to a hero of color is a form of hegemony limiting the hero of color to the service of white interests and values. Therefore, Allen’s narration of the story becomes a self-reflexive narrative device framing the potentially assimilationist sociopolitics of the western. Stapecoach is an important source for the novel because of its emphasis on social prejudice and the ability for heroic action to redeem social outcasts and reeducate bigots. In Sfapecoach outlaw Ringo (John Wayne) and prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor) are scorned by the coach’s upper crust, specifically by Mrs. Mallory (Louise Platt), a Southern lady and officer’s wife. When Ringo saves the stage from hordes of Hollywood Indians and Dallas nurtures Mrs. Mallory’s newborn, both outcasts are partially redeemed and Mrs. Mallory is reeducated regarding the merits of social tolerance. However, Stagecoach’s conventional and moral complexity lies in clever thematic twists. For example. Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) announces that Ringo and Dallas are “saved from the blessings of civilization” at the film’s end, and the two outcasts comically ride toward Mexico where they will apparently marry. While both are redeemed in the eyes of “civilization,” this last proclamation has often been read as a repudiation of hypocritical “civilized” values and/or as the outcasts’ exile, darkening whatever assimilationist optimism the film ostensibly advocates. Stagecoach is a remarkably complex western, and no critic’s reference to the film as a foundation for future westerns should belittle this complexity. The most important features of Stagecoach as a source for Hombre. however, lie in the former’s notion that heroism can redeem outcasts and educate bigots. Stagecoach’s emphasis on tolerance mainly revolves around outlawry, prostitution, alcoholism, gambling, post-bellum reconciliation of North and South, and especially class. Accordingly, Stagecoach’s ultimate symbol of irresponsible privilege is a crooked banker (Berton Churchill), a greedy and irresponsible symbol of the banks in the era of the Great Depression. By turning the banker into the Indian Agent Favor Leonard nods to Ford’s device but also more thoroughly foregrounds racism.^ While Stagecoach is comically sarcastic about the “blessings of civilization,” Hombre is absolutely grim about the 8 Stagecoach itself is full of racially charged and frequently racist themes, primary surrounding its treatment of Mexican and Indian characters, but Ford’s film is not really about racism so much as it is about other forms of social prejudice. 77 blessings of white civilization. Leonard’s is a world where redeeming the outcast hero means assimilating and, therefore, destroying him, and where the bigots cannot be easily educated. Leonard’s bleakest and most realistic suggestion, however, is that obvious villains like Favor are not the only ones distorted by bigotry.

RACE AND GENDER IN LEONARD’S WESTERNS

James Devlin recounts one of Leonard’s earliest creative efforts, a school-play version of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front: “Among other dubious casting decisions, he gave his class’s only black youth the role of a German soldier” (5). Leonard’s childhood interest in the potential of a conventional character type colliding with racially unconventional casting seems to have carried over into his western work in the 1950s. In these westerns Leonard finds drama in the apparent incompatibilities of a conventional hero and the interests of people of color. In “The Hard Way” (1953), for instance, Mexican deputy Jimmy Robles is forced to kill his Uncle Tio in the line of duty; Robles finds himself a segregated cop in a segregated community wondering if he serves the Mexican public or the white power structure. Moreover, Leonard’s 1950s westerns express a general interest in non-white cultures of the Southwest, as in “The Nagual” (1956) where Ofelio Oso explains the old Mexican legend of a “man who is able to transform himself into a certain animal” (301). Leonard’s knowledge of the Southwest and its cultures was not first-hand. Leonard biographer David Geherin notes that along with Arizona High wavs the Detroit writer drew most of his knowledge of the West from books like Foster Harris’s The Look of the Old West (19). Likewise, it was from books that Leonard gleaned his knowledge of Apache Indians; Once he decided to specialize in Apaches, he also read John C. Cremony’s Life Among the Apaches. Frank C. Lockwood’s The Apache Indians, and two volumes by Morric Edward Opler, An Apache Life-Wav and Mvths and Tales of The Chiricahua Apache Indians. (19)

78 The accuracy of Leonard’s ethnographic knowledge, however, is less interesting to me than the uses to which this knowledge is put in his westerns. Most interesting in these westerns is Leonard’s honing his craft on Indian-related plots despite the protests of his agent Marguerite Harper that these plots constituted commercial suicide. Harper wrote Leonard in 1955 that she “always disliked westerns that concern themselves with Indians. I wish you would set your sights on some other kind of story. If it must be westerns, then anything but Indians as I find a lot of editors don’t like them any more than I do” (qtd. in Challen 43). Harper in general objected to Leonard’s concentrating on westerns, as she sensed the market for cheap westerns was drying up due to competition from the television western. It turns out that she was right about the market, but Harper died in 1966 and would never see the degree to which Leonard eventually abandoned the western for crime writing (39). Leonard’s westerns of the 1960s suggest that one reason he stuck with the genre was for a dramatic tension he found in those Indian-related plots Harper deplored as unmarketable. Admittedly, this dramatic tension was not specific to Indians in his work; rather, it stemmed from more general anxieties regarding assimilation and people of color. In addition to Hombre. Leonard went on to explore the issue of assimilation in the westerns “Only Good Ones” (1961), Valdez is Coming (1970), Fortv Lashes Less One (1972), and his screenplay for the John Sturges film Joe Kidd (1972), starring Clint Eastwood. In fact, almost every western Leonard has produced since 1960 explores racism and/or assimilation in some way. A prime example of Leonard’s interest in racism and assimilation surrounding the hero, similar to “The Hard Way” in its emphasis on a lawman of color and published the same year as Hombre. is the short story “Only Good Ones.” “Only Good Ones,” like Hombre. explores assimilation through a self-conscious exploration of heroism as hegemony. “Only Good Ones,” also like Hombre. locates its self-consciousness in themes of observation and, therefore, merits closer reading as an example of Leonard’s interests at the time of Hombre’s publication. The story opens with an African American man and a Lipan Apache woman under siege in their home by a vigilante mob of mostly white townspeople. A powerful white man, Mr. Tanner, accuses the African American Rincon or, as the vigilantes insist is his real name, Johnson, of killing a white man at Fort 79 Huachuca when caught deserting the Tenth Cavalry. Also on hand are white powerbrokers Beaudry and Malsom, a Mexican horsebreaker named Diego Luz, and another white man, the insecure poser R. L. Davis. When Bob Valdez, the newly hired town constable, arrives and assumes control, he is treated with racist scorn by the white vigilantes, who limit his jurisdiction to handling drunk Mexicans in town. R. L. Davis, egged on by Tanner, takes shots at the apparently unresponsive Apache woman when she comes out for water until Valdez decides to take control of the situation. Valdez approaches Rincon, who talks to Valdez from the doorway, proclaiming his itmocence and telling the lawman that his papers are in his wagon. When Valdez turns for the papers, R. L. Davis fires on Rincon, Rincon turns to fire on Valdez, and Valdez blasts Rincon back inside, killing him. Upon approaching the house, they find the Apache woman dead and pregnant along with Rincon, who Tarmer now claims is not the right man. R. L. Davis says, “Constable . . . you went and killed the wrong coon,” and, when Valdez responds by swinging his shotgun at Davis, Luz gun-whips him (68). As we will see in Hombre. the issue of observation is all over “Only Good Ones” and frequently connected to the story’s racial themes. The story opens with a line about looking: “Picture the ground rising on the east side of the pasture with scrub trees thick on the slope and pines higher up” (54). But the idea of picturing soon moves beyond mere description and assumes greater significance when Tanner says of Rincon, “I’ve kept that man’s face before my eyes this past year”: Bob Valdez, somewhat behind Mr. Tanner and to the side, moved in a little closer. “You know this is the man, uh?” Mr. Tanner looked around. He stared at Valdez. That’s all he did—just stared. (61) Tanner’s stare, articulating his contempt for Valdez’s authority and his confidence in his own, complements his certainty that the picture he has kept “before his eyes” matches the man they have cornered. When the vigilantes and Valdez discover that Tanner is wrong. Tanner says, “It looked like him... It sure looked like him” (67). Then, more vulnerable, more aware of the need to justify his mistake. Tanner adds, “I’ve seen him before, though. Know I’ve seen him somewheres,” to which R. L. Davis shrugs, “You ask me, they all look alike”

80 (68). Tanner’s authoritative look is undermined by the mistake, but Davis uses the racism underlying Tanner’s mistake as an excuse: “they all look alike.” The notion that “they all look alike” is then implicitly carried over to Valdez when the end of the short story jumps ahead three years as the former vigilantes discuss an outlaw in the news named Robert Eladio Valdez, hanged for murder “If it is the same Bob Valdez used to live here,” Mr. Beaudry said, “it’s good we got rid of hiiiL” “Well, it could be,” Mr. Malsom said. “But I guess there are Bob Valdezes all over.” “You wonder what gets into them,” Mr. Beaudry said. (68) Tanner’s comment about Rincon, i.e., “Know I’ve seen him somewheres,” foreshadows the news story on Robert Eladio Valdez. With Valdez, however, the mistaking of one man for another is replaced with a stereotype: “But I guess there are Bob Valdezes all over.” The racist leap, a short one at that, from “they all look alike” to “it’s good we got rid of him” is problematized by the story’s title itself, “Only Good Ones.” A possible twist on the saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” substituting Mexican for Indian, the title also foreshadows that Bob Valdez, one of the “Good Ones,” will be destroyed by the injustice of white law, mob rule where white power reigns to break good men. Therefore, while the story intimates a turn to outlawry in the spirit of outlaw legends like Gregorio Cortez, the white vigilantes fail to observe the connection: “You wonder what gets into them.”^ The observations of the white mob become the final forced assimilation of Valdez into a white man’s definition of outlawry, just as his assimilation to white law earlier destroys two lives and compromises his own. In one telling exchange Bob Valdez struggles to prove himself less assimilationist than the horsebreaker Diego Luz, saying, “One of them bends over [... ] you kiss it, uh?”:

^ For a discussion of the life and legend of Mexican outlaw Gregorio Cortez, along with variants of the ballad and a discussion of the Mexican corrido tradition, see Américo Paredes seminal study “With His Pistol in His Hand" A Border Ballad and Its Hero f1958\ The film The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez f19821. inspired by Paredes’s work, is an underrated western. The film is a study in subjectivity and race, like other revisionist westerns including not only Leonard’s work but also John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and The Outrage (1964), Martin Ritt’s mediocre western remake of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). 81 Bob Valdez said, “That’s why you hit the horses.” “Listen,” Diego Luz said, scowling a bit now. “They pay me to break horses. They pay you to talk to drunks on Saturday night and keep them from killing somebody. They don’t pay you for what you think or how you feel, so if you t5ce their money, keep your mouth shut. All right?” (63)

Valdez associates Diego Luz’s horsebreaking, dirty work for which he frequently uses his fists, with his servitude to white men.^0 But Valdez, Luz retorts, is little more than a people breaker for white men himself, and both are men broken by white hegemony. Both men are pawns in a game of white power. And much of this deferral to white power is inherent in the story’s interest in men posing to be adequately observed by others. Valdez himself, though he continually struggles to articulate his authority to the indifferent mob, resents R. L. Davis’s posing: R. L. Davis standing hip-cocked, posing with his revolver and rifle and a cartridge belt over his shoulder and the funneled, pointed brim of his sweaty hat nodding up and down as he listened to Mr. Tanner, smiling at what Mr. Tanner said, laughing out loud while still Mr. Tanner did not even show the twitch of a lip. Bob Valdez did not like R. L. Davis or any of the R. L. Davises he had met. He was civil, he listened to them, but, God, there were a lot of them to listen to. (56) When read in opposition to Malsom’s later comment about the “Bob Valdezes” of the world, the lawman’s annoyance with Davis has racial overtones (68). Nevertheless, the context surrounding his irritation with Davis reveals that he is specifically annoyed with Davis’s feeble attempts to ingratiate himself to Tanner, and here Valdez’s critique of Davis resembles Luz’s critique of Valdez. Above Davis is “posing with his revolver,” at another point he adjusts his hat, “which he did often,” and later, when Davis is hazed into shooting at the woman and then teased even more for her indifference to his shots, the eager initiate is described as “onstage” (56-57, 60). The connections between Valdez and Davis as both posing to be taken seriously are interesting on a number of levels. First, “Only Good Ones,” although told in third person and, therefore, not as immediately inclined to connect looking with narration as is Hombre. Tres Hombres is a horsebreaker as well, a job that allows him to be outdoors but puts him directly in the service of white power. In fact, the border status of Tres Hombres in accentuated by the fact that he tames nature for “civilization.” Horsebreaking and assimilation are also equated in Hal Borland's When the Legends Die (1963), the stoiy of Thomas Black Bull, a Native American who becomes a rodeo star. Borland’s fictional novel also explores assimilationist anxieties through Thomas Black Bull’s dissatisfaction with the white school, though Borland’s interest in Native American people and schooling is in the spirit of much older nonfiction like Zitkala Sa’s (a.k.a. Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) Impressions of an Indian Childhood (1900). 82 nonetheless explores connections between looking and genie. Valdez and Davis, as well as Diego Luz, strike poses in attempts to be taken seriously as men, and these poses reflect a very conventional politics of male behavior in the western, though they also self- reflexively draw attention to the generic quality of this politics by making performance an obvious part of the characters’ lives. Moreover, these poses are problematized by the issue of race in the story. Luz’s posing as the white man’s lackey, and his violent silencing of Valdez’s dissent at the end of the story, traps him in the service of white power. And Davis’s posing is compatible with his big-talking brand of racism. Lastly, Valdez’s attempts to perform as a lawman, while gaining the limited approval of the vigilantes, is as assimilationist as the attitude of Diego Luz. For instance, when Valdez approaches Rincon’s home, Malsom is impressed by the sight: ‘“Look at him,’ Mr. Malsom said. There was some admiration in the voice” (64). But R. L. Davis easily observes this heroic bravery as stupidity, saying, “He’s dumber than he looks.” Furthermore, Malsom’s inclination to look kindly upon Valdez’s bravery is tainted by the fact that the deaths of two innocent people of color will result; what little solidarity Valdez and Luz might find with these victims of white injustice is destroyed with their lives. Perhaps the most mysterious and disturbing image of obser\'ation in “Only Good Ones,” however, comes form a rag doll the Lipan Apache woman leaves on the ground: “It was a strange thing, the woman having a doll. Valdez hardly glanced at it but was aware of the button eyes looking up and the discomforted twist of the red wool mouth” (65). The doll reflects Valdez’s own discomfort and foreshadows the woman’s pregnancy. Moreover, the blank expression one might imagine on a doll’s face recalls the woman’s apparent indifference to the bullets of R. L. Davis but also indicates possible emotion, by the “discomforted twist” of the “red” mouth, beneath what is basically a stereotype of the “silent Indian.” Earlier Valdez wonders if Rincon sent the woman for water or if she went herself, and he indulges in gender and racial stereotypes as he thinks: “You couldn’t tell about an Indian woman. Maybe this was expected of her. The woman didn’t count; the man did. You could lose the woman and get another one” (59-60). “Only Good Ones” does very little to rectify these stereotypes of female and, particularly, Indian female

83 subservience, but the line “The woman didn’t count; the man did” becomes less an observation than a warning considering that both woman and unborn child die from the stray bullets of this struggle between men. “Only Good Ones” exemplifies Leonard’s self-consciousness about generic heroism as racial assimilationism and announces themes at the center of Hombre and almost all of Leonard’s later westerns. After spending part of the 1960s doing little writing except freelance work to support his family, Leonard caved to Harper’s advice to turn from westerns to other genres in order to survive the threat of television (Challen 35-49). When 20th Century Fox offered $10,000 for the rights to Hombre in 1965, Leonard, biting the generic hand that fed him, used the money to write The Big Bounce (1969), the first of the crime novels for which he would later become most famous (57). He also published the Prohibition-era crime novel The Moonshine War (1969) and the modem crime novel 52 Pick-Up (1974). It is noteworthy, however, that even after turning to crime writing the issue of assimilation is dealt with most thoroughly in Leonard’s westerns. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon is that some of these themes get recycled when some of the plots get recycled. For instance, Valdez is Coming is an expanded version of the short story “Only Good Ones” and, therefore, grows out of the themes close to Leonard in the year both “Only Good Ones” and Hombre were published. Nevertheless, the western gemre, with its hero struggling to reconcile competing cultural interests, lends itself to Leonard’s obvious interest in the tensions surrounding racial assimilation. Moreover, while Leonard’s crime novels also often involve people of color, he has returned to the westem format for exploring issues of race, e.g., in the westem “The Tonto Woman” (1982) and in novels with westem elements like Mr. Majestvk (1974), a modem westem crime novel involving a melon grower and a Chicana migrant activist, and Cuba Libre (1998), which drops an Arizona cowboy right in the middle of 1898 Cuba to participate in the Spanish-American War with a woman who dreams of being a revolutionary. In addition to racial assimilation themes all of these westerns show an unusual interest in female characters and in issues of femininity intertwined with issues of race. Significantly, Harper seems to have encouraged Leonard in 1955 to cultivate an interest in female characters and plots: 84 I think the trouble is the very minor woman interest. It is necessary in magazine stories to have woman interest, even in a westem. In the first place women were very much a part of the setting of the west But primarily, entertainment does include romance, (qtd. in Challen 43-44) How much Leonard took Harper’s comment to heart is a matter of speculation. Nevertheless, possibilities for romance and strong female protagonists, while almost always secondary to male protagonists, turn up in Leonard’s novels Last Stand at Saber River (1959), Hombre. Valdez is Coming. Fortv Lashes Less One. Mr. Majestyk. and Cuba Libre. Furthermore, even before Harper’s recommendation, one of Leonard’s earliest experiments with female characters merges gender issues with race issues and lays the groundwork for abduction plots that reappear in Hombre and later westerns. Leonard experimented with the white woman captive as potential femme fatale in the 1952 short story “The Colonel’s Lady,’’ a story worth describing for its emphasis on intersecting race and gender stereotypes and its limited interrogation of each. In the story Chiricahua Apache renegade Mata Lobo abducts the Colonel’s lady. She is aptly named Mrs. Darck, and the story constantly inverts the color signification at the heart of captivity narrative, e.g., describing “Devil’s Flats’’ as “bleak, bone-bleached whiteness” (97). When Simon Street, a westem hero with an urbanized name, finally recovers Mrs. Darck, she has killed Mata Lobo herself: He looked again at the Apache and then to the woman. Disbelief in his eyes. He started to say something, but Amelia Darck went on. “I’ve lived out here most of my life, Mr. Street, as you know. I heard Apache war drums long before I attended my first cotillion, but I have hardly reached the point where I have to take an Apache for a lover.” Simon Street saw a thousand troops and a hundred scouts in the field. Then he looked at the slender woman walking briskly up the grade. (101-102) Amelia Darck’s westem self-reliance renders “a thousand troops and a hundred scouts” unnecessary, and these last lines parody the casts of thousands that have been mobilized in literature and film to rescue lily-white captives from Mata Lobos and other men of color, from the first captivity narratives of the frontier to Griffith’s racist paranoia in Birth of a Nation (1915) to John Carradine’s putting a gun to Louise Platt’s head in Stagecoach to protect the white lady from the rape and/or abduction that supposedly follows an Indian raid. Darck, lying against the white bark of a birch tree, plays veteran pioneer to Street’s

85 feeble rescue, inverting the frequent gendering of town as female and trail as male. But the Apache is still the victim of misrepresentation and stereotype. Darck’s active, in fact violent, refusal to “take an Apache for a lover,” while complicating generic assumptions about gender and agency, is still quite conventional insofar as it pits white femininity against an animalisticIndian stereotype embodied in the canine Mata Lobo. However, there is one more ironic twist to Leonard’s 1952 captivity narrative: the reader is left with only Mrs. Darck’s word that she did not couple with Mata Lobo before killing him. In fact, the short story hinges on this suspense, at one point suggesting compliance on the part of Darck, a suggestion only refuted by Darck herself. Before Street arrives, Leonard writes: “Her face was the same. The eyes open, infrequently blinking. She smelled the sour dirt-smell of the Apache’s body. Then she opened her arms and pulled him to her” (99). Mrs. Darck, while she participates in a celebration of female survival as old as Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, challenges the supposed terror with which the white woman conventionally views the sexuality of the Indian. This said, the short story’s joke about the myth of sanctified white femininity is partly achieved through the implication of biracial promiscuity, an implication that threatens gender and race taboos but also relies on these taboos to work. Active in her own restoration and perhaps sexually active as well, Mrs. Darck is complicated and exciting but also a bit diabolical, and this particular brand of revisionism exemplifies the ways in which problematizing the gender and race conventions of the westem can lead to other forms of sexism and racism. 1 ^ Leonard recycled some of the same ideas about race and gender in Hombre but with more artistic aplomb and sociopolitical sensitivity.

^ ^ Little Big Man (1964), Thomas Berger’s novel about westem myth-making, is another example of the potential sexism and racism lurking at the heart of the revisionist westem. The novel’s narrator Jack Crabb, generic kin to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, vacillates between empathy with the Cheyenne and explicit racism. Crabb’s “abduction” by the Cheyenne becomes a parody of captivity plots. When he and his sister tag along with the warriors who have killed their father, they are deluded by his sister’s rape fantasies into thinking they have been captured when in fact they are unwanted. For a more thorough exploration of the sexism in Little Bie Man see Heatherington (1979, 1985). 86 GETTING A “GOOD LOOK” AT HOMBRE

In Hombre Leonard shifts the concentration from the female “victim” of “The Colonel’s Lady” to the white, male hero and Apache warrior embodied in one character Tres Hombres. Leonard is specifically interested in the hero’s reluctance to help the other passengers and in these passengers’ observation of the hero’s reluctance. Carl Allen’s position as both a passenger and the story’s narrator allows for the fusion of characters’ observations of the hero and narration, making this novel always self-consciously about perceptions of heroism. Allen’s desire for Tres Hombres to act heroically according to a narrow definition of heroism leads to the hero’s eventual death and, therefore, represents a graesome forced assimilation of a complicated man to a conventional hero type. Allen’s is always a limited picture of the liminal hero Tres Hombres, a hero whose identities include Juan (Mexican), Ish-kay-nay (Apache), John Russell (white), and more: sometimes “Man,” sometimes “Hombre,” sometimes ‘Tres Hombres.” It is fitting then that Allen and the others address Tres Hombres only by the whitest of his names: “Russell.” To see Tres Hombres as only John Russell is to be blinded to his Indianness as well as to Hombre’s silent Apaches, and a dimension of Tres Hombres’s heroism and cultural identity escapes the other characters’ racist points of view because they have learned to see heroism as synonymous with the name “Russell.” Therefore, I choose to call this character “Tres Hombres” out of respect for the plurality of the hero’s identity, a double, triple, even multiple consciousness grounded in cultural difference that escapes the notice of the novel’s other characters. Allen’s narration and the others’ observations of the hero conspire to make Tres Hombres something that he is not. But Allen is also the novel’s young initiate, like the narrators of Shane and Horseman. Pass Bv. Allen’s power to shape the story is tempered by his young search for a heroic role model. Therefore, debates that ensue in Hombre over

87 the “proper” heroic response to the events of the plot allow Tres Hombres to model a heroism for Allen outside of service to white bigotry, though this modeling also is filtered through and challenged by the racist perspectives of Allen and the others. Even before Allen begins to narrate the action of Hombre he prefaces his narration with anxieties about getting the story right; At first I wasn’t sure at all where to begin. When I asked advice, this man from the Florence Enterprise said begin at the beginning, the day the coach departed from Sweetmary with everybody aboard. Which sounded fine until I got to doing it. Then I saw it wasn’t the beginning at all. There was too much to explain at one time. Who the people were, where they were going and all. Also, starting there didn’t tell enough about John Russell. He is the person this story is mainly about If it had not been for him, we would all be dead and there wouldn’t be anybody telling this. So 1 will begin with the first time I ever saw John Russell. I think you will see why after you learn a few things about him. (163) Allen’s anxiety speaks to the novel’s strained exploration of “Who the people were,” a problem of human understanding as much as narration and a problem exacerbated by the racist misunderstandings the book explores. This preface also suggests Leonard’s, if not Allen’s, generic self-awareness since the book is concerned from the first page with centering the westem hero and the significance of his heroic actions: “He is the person this story is mainly about. If it had not been for him, we would all be dead and there wouldn’t be anybody telling this.” The dual interest in “Who the people were” and the western’s heroic conventions continues in the novel’s first chapter. In the first chapter Leonard illustrates that the actions or inaction of the westem hero are often determined by cultural context, as Carl Allen ponders two of the chapter’s occasions for heroic violence, one to which Tres Hombres rises and another to which he shows utter indifference. On the first of these occasions for heroic violence Allen accompanies his boss Mr. Heiuy Mendez of the soon to be obsolete Hatch & Hodges stage company to the stop at Delgado’s Station and to Allen’s first encounter with Tres Hombres. Mendez hopes to talk Tres Hombres, a voluntary Apache adoptee, into becoming John Russell full time, living in a house Russell has inherited in town, and assimilating into the life of a white man. But Tres Hombres responds by picking a fight with Lamarr Dean and Early, two racist

Obviously, Allen’s anxiety with narration is also a realist device used to suggest his unembellished response to the events o f the novel. 88 cowboys who are harassing White Mountain Apache horsebreakers. Dean and Early mock the Apaches with stereotypes of alcoholism, and they try to bully Delgado’s into being a segregated bar by spilling one Apache’s drink and telling Delgado he should refuse service to people who, as the stereotype goes, cannot hold their liquor (170-171). Tres Hombres responds heroically to the harassment of the White Mountain Apaches, but even within this heroic response lie motivations that defy the narrator’s notion of westem heroism: Russell was right there. But he didn’t nudge him. He didn’t ask or tell him to leave the Apache alone. Or say anything like, “If you want to pick on somebody, try me.” He didn’t give Lamarr a chance to know he was there. He just swung the barrel of the Spencer up clean and quick and before you had a chance to believe it was happening the barrel shattered the glass right against Lamarr Dean’s mouth. Lamarr jumped back, dropping the broken pieces and with blood all over his hand and face. (171) Tres Hombres defies Carl Allen’s expectations of heroic behavior, and perhaps the expectations of many readers, when he hits Dean without warning. Leonard mobilizes the realist device of exposing heroic cliche in order to breathe novelty into generic conventions, but Tres Hombres’s actions also address the subjective qualities of heroism. Allen straggles to process the heroic actions of Tres Hombres, and Leonard uses Allen’s perplexed response in order to reveal competing definitions of heroism. Moreover, while the response of Tres Hombres to the harassment of the White Mountain Apaches exemplifies heroic conventions foreign to Allen’s expectations, Tres Hombres’s indifference about the harassment of an ex-soldier at the Hatch & Hodges station later in the chapter confuses Allen even more. Three weeks after the Delgado’s incident, Tres Hombres enters the Hatch & Hedges station. Here he plans to catch a mud wagon from Sweetmary to Contention, where he will sell the home he has inherited and avoid the trappings of white “civilization.” At the station, Frank Braden, informed that the stage is full, tries to take Tres Hombres’s ticket. An ex-soldier, who plans to join the other passengers on his way “to Bisbee to get married after twelve years of Army,” tells Braden to leave Tres Hombres alone, at which point Braden decides to take the ex-soldier’s ticket instead (185). When Braden threatens violence, the ex-soldier gives him the ticket and leaves. Allen is “bothered” that he did not help the ex-soldier but more bothered that Tres Hombres, who the soldier stood up for, refused to return the offer: 89 “He would have helped you and you know it,” [Allen] said. “I don’t know it,” Russell said. “If he did, it would be up to him. But it wouldn’t be any of my business.” (186-187) Allen wonders why Tres Hombres fails to reciprocate the ex-soldier’s favor and stand up to Braden on the ex-soldier’s behalf, and Allen’s disappointment with Tres Hombres’s apparent failure to heroically respond mirrors his disappointment with his own failure to respond. The narrator seeks instruction in the discipline of westem heroism but is disappointed to watch his potential teacher, Tres Hombres, sit indifferently as Braden bullies his way into a seat on the coach. Because of Allen’s disappointment a short dialogue ensues, a debate between Allen and Ties Hombres on the subject of the proper heroic response in which Allen is angered by the “calm” attitude of Tres Hombres, whose response ostensibly lingers somewhere between pragmatism and callous disregard for others. While Allen questions why Tres Hombres might respond heroically in one instance and show a reluctance to help in another, events in the novel begin to reveal that Tres Hombres’s real enemy is not the bully Frank Braden but racism. And it is against racism that Tres Hombres most enthusiastically lashes out later in the mud wagon. The mud wagon, like the coach in Stagecoach, provides a thematic vehicle for the study of social prejudice, as Tres Hombres rides with Mendez, Allen, a former Indian abductee who Allen calls the “McLaren girl,” Frank Braden, Audra Favor, and her husband, the Indian agent Dr. Favor. Along the way, Allen observes the racism of the passengers, as well as his own, when Tres Hombres is asked to ride on top because he lets the others assume he is a biological Indian. Tres Hombres reveals that he was once a member of the reservation police, a job only held by Apaches, after Audra Favor’s racist description of the Apache lifestyle: A white woman . . . couldn’t live the way they do. The Apache women rubbing skins and grinding com, their hair greasy and full of vermin. The men no better. All of them standing around or squatting, picking themselves and the dogs sniffing them. They even eat the dogs sometimes . . . I wonder . . . if a woman could fall into their ways and after a while it wouldn’t bother her. Like eating with your fingers. Or do you suppose you could eat dog and not think anything of it? (192) Tres Hombres responds, “What if you didn’t have anything else to eat?” (193). Then, he reveals he was an Apache policeman, and is eventually excluded from the inside of the 90 coach. Très Hombres’s exclusion from the inside of the coach—Leonard’s nod to the era of Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955), and the politics of (de)segregation throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s—is only the first of the racisms explored in Leonard’s novel. Audra Favor’s callousness to reservation poverty and the segregation of the coach set the metaphorical stage for the novel’s most egregious racist act: Dr. Favor’s embezzlement of government subsidies and the subsequent starvation of reservation Apaches. Favor’s crime is revealed to the other passengers when the coach is robbed by bandits: Braden, Dean, Early, and “the Mexican.” The bandits steal the horses and take Mrs. Favor hostage, but their plan backfires when Tres Hombres kills Dean for the money, some water, and a chance at survival in the harsh desert Forced to run on foot from the bandits and finally to bargain for the life of Mrs. Favor with the Apaches’s meat money, the passengers must rely on Tres Hombres’s Indian skills for their survival. Tres Hombres’s refusal to give “Lamarr a chance to know he was there” and his rationale for not helping the ex-soldier are joined later by his cold, pragmatic responses to a number of situations in the desert. For example, Tres Hombres leaves the scene of the robbery so quickly that the other passengers can barely keep up, even though it is clear to everyone, including the hero, that he is their best chance at survival. Later, when they have caught up with him, the passengers must choose between running across open country or staying to fight, the latter of which Tres Hombres insists is the most practical solution: “Then hide somewhere,” Mendez said, “and wait for dark to cross it.” Russell nodded, “Or do better than that. Wait for them here. Shoot their horses and make it even, uh? Maybe finish it.” “Finish it,” I said, understanding him, but I guess not believing what he was asking us to do. “You mean try and kill them?” “If they get close enough,” Russell said, “they’re going to kill you.” (228) Shooting horses. Shooting men. Leaving the other passengers, who struggle to catch up. Thinking about nothing but the objective of surviving the hot desert and escaping the bandits who give chase for the water and the money. These are the apparent objectives of Tres Hombres, objectives he approaches with the practical single-mindedness of the great western literary heroes from the namesake of Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) to

91 Lassiter in Zane Gray’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). Tres Hombres, however, is not seen by the other passengers as a great western hero; rather, he is treated suspiciously, often criminally, by the others even though they depend on him for their survival, and both their suspicion and their dependence accompanies the association of his cold pragmatism with his Apache upbringing. For example, the journey across the desert and the other passengers’ dependence on Tres Hombres’s practical survival skills begins when the hero dons Apache clothing: “Russell had both moccasins on now. He took his boots and rolled them inside the blanket Doing this, not looking at us, he said, ‘You want to go with me, uh?”’ (22). The survival skills of Tres Hombres subtly play on old ethnographic notions of Apaches as the Indians who can run the longest distance with the least amount of water, but the other passengers’ readings of the hero are more obviously racist. During his debate with Tres Hombres over the ex-soldier, for example, Allen suddenly notes in a narrative aside that Tres Hombres’s “face was thin and you saw those strange blue-colored eyes set in the darkness of his skin”; here Allen describes the hero’s moral ambiguity in terms of racial ambiguity (186). Still more overtly racist is Dr. Favor who, himself a thief and armchair murderer of San Carlos Reservation Apaches, accuses Tres Hombres of deserting the others for the money, asking, “Do you expect somebody like that to act the way a decent person would?” (221). In addition to arguing that Indians or Tres Hombres’s brand of Indian sympathizer are less “decent” than white people. Favor uses Indian stereotypes to argue against staying and fighting when the group is cornered between the bandits and open country: ‘“Chief make plenty war now,’ [Favor] said. You see how he was passing it off? Like Russell was a bully you had to give in to if you wanted some peace” (228). And Favor again plays the race card to try to tum the McLaren girl against Tres Hombres, appealing to her anger over domestic servitude and her captivity by suggesting that her helping Tres Hombres will make her an Indian: “‘Squaw work,’ Dr. Favor said. ‘You ought to like that’” (230).______It also befits Allen’s racist character that, while keen enough to spot Favor’s rhetoric, he misses the racism at the heart of Favor’s appeals; i.e., Allen notes that Favor misrepresents the hero as a “bully,” but the narrator misses the underlying equation of Indians with bullies. It is especially apparent that Allen has missed the point when one notices that all of the bullies in the novel are white and, in the case of Dean and Early, overtly racist. 92 Putting the most overt racism in the mouth of the novel’s nastiest character masks Hombre’s more subtle stereotyping of Indians, but Hombre also cleverly foregrounds cultural and racial misperception through the characters’ misunderstandings of the hero’s motives. The novel illustrates the relationship between racist social conventions and perception; correspondingly, the novel illustrates the relationship between generic conventions and narration. Hombre uses stereotypes of American Indians, presenting Native Americans as drill sergeants in some primitivist generic boot camp where white men from Cooper’s Leather-Stockings to Leonard’s Tres Hombres, with his Apache moccasins, learn to survive and be men. But Hombre also constantly reveals the problems of defining heroism without cultural context, as Allen struggles for an accurate narrative “picture” of the hero.^^ It never occurs to Allen that Tres Hombres’s inclination or refusal to act heroically is motivated by the circumstances; for example, if Tres Hombres were to jump to the aid of the ex-soldier it would be like aiding the enemy, given the hero’s clear opposition to the government’s treatment of Apaches. Moreover, Allen assumes too much about the Apaches Tres Hombres “saves” in the beginning of the novel, attributing their quiet forbearance to a language barrier “They heard him, you could tell, but didn’t pay any attention. Of course not, I realized; they didn’t know any English” (170). While there is little in the novel to suggest that Allen is wrong in assuming a language barrier, there is nothing to suggest that the Apaches are not simply bearing the burden of white privilege in an era of extraordinary violence against Native American people. Perhaps most importantly, it never occurs to Allen or the others that Tres Hombres wants the money for the Apaches, so they can buy the food that is legally theirs. In fact, Tres Hombres’s intentions for the money are not revealed to the passengers until the end of the novel, when Tres Hombres decides to respond heroically to the captivity and torture of Audra Favor, but not before some debate about the value of Dr. and Mrs. Favor’s lives.

Allen frequently commands the reader to “picture” the people and events he describes. Describing his first “real look at John Russell,” he writes, “Picture the belt down across his chest with the sun glinting on the bullets that filled most of the loops” (167). He also asks readers to “picture” the Mexican leaving Mrs. Favor tied in the sun later in the novel (269), and he uses his own imagination to picture the Favors alone and to picture the McLaren girl when she is “too close to look right at” in the coach (279, 188). 93 By the end o f the novel, in response to Dr. Favor’s repeated attempt to steal the money, as well as the water, Tres Hombres has forced him into exile from the group, a reversal of Tres Hombres’s exile from inside the coach and the attempt to segregate Delgado’s. When the passengers sneak into a shack at the top of the San Pete mine, the doctor reappears at the bottom of the grade, unaware of the skin of water hanging nearby that was left by the group when they rested the day before. The dehydrated Dr. Favor pumps frantically at a dry trough, priming an argument between the McLaren girl and Tres Hombres: “We have to tell him,” she said then, calm and quiet about it, stating a fact, not just giving in to pity at the sight of him. “We don’t do anything,” Russell said from the door. He kept his gaze on Dr. Favor who had sat down now, one arm still on the pump handle. “You can look at that man,” the McLaren girl said, “and not want to help him?” She was staring at Russell now. “He’ll move off,” Russell said. “Then you won’t have to look at him.” “But he’s dying of thirst. You can see he is!” “What did you think would happen?” Russell said. He looked at her then. “You didn’t think you’d see him again. So yesterday was all right, uh?” (258) Allen, who is observing the exchange, notes, “It didn’t seem to bother Russell any. He said, ‘You want to go down to him? Make tracks on that slope that hasn’t been touched in five years? You want to make signs pointing up where we are?’” (258). Just as Allen observes the debate, Tres Hombres and McLaren observe each other. And what appears to be an argument pitting the practical Tres Hombres against the passionate McLaren takes on another dimension as Tres Hombres and McLaren each struggle to observe the other’s values. When Allen calls McLaren’s “calm and quiet” assertion that they should help Dr. Favor “a fact,” he inadvertently reveals the rhetoric at the heart of the novel’s pragmatism, for she is not stating a fact any more than Tres Hombres states a fact when he calmly explains why he refuses to help the ex-soldier. Rather, the pose of calmness during both incidents is a rhetorical appeal proclaiming that the “dispassionate” speakers have the authority to make the most logical decision. McLaren has perhaps learned this pragmatic response from Tres Hombres in the desert, but neither McLaren nor Tres Hombres is truly dispassionate. Tres Hombres critiques the problem of observation, the problem faced by the characters and the narrator, when he argues, “You didn’t think you’d see him again. 94 So yesterday was all right, uh?” And the McLaren girl acknowledges her mistake: “If I didn’t speak up yesterday . . . I was wrong.” But Tres Hombres is also prone to forgetting suffering he cannot see, as the dialogue suggests with some subtlety; i.e., just as McLaren turns her stare away from Dr. Favor and to Tres Hombres, he also turns his gaze away from Dr. Favor to her. Both look at each other, perhaps trying to understand even as they try to convince, but it is just as likely that both are uneasy with looking at suffering. Nevertheless, if Tres Hombres is uneasy with Favor’s suffering, he neither admits it nor offers to help. Rather, McLaren runs to the bottom of the hill to help, and, confirming Tres Hombres’s suspicions about the dangers of doing so, is seen by the bandits as she and Dr. Favor climb their way back to the shack. Now cornered in the shack, the passengers watch the bandits tie Audra Favor in the sun. McLaren argues that Tres Hombres should give them the money because it is the decent thing to do, but Tres Hombres tums his look back to the task at hand, firing on the bandits so they know he means business or, as he puts it, “So they see us” (262). Tres Hombres’s powers of observation, therefore, tum to survival, as he spends much of the rest of the novel staring through the sights of his Spencer, waiting to pick off a bandit or two to improve the passengers’ odds. This last stand of dispassionate action aside, the novel continues to critique any equation of “pragmatism” with “indifference” and any assumption that Tres Hombres is simply apathetic. McLaren’s constant verbal assault offers a theory about Tres Hombres’s actual motives. At one point, the Mexican taunts Tres Hombres by threatening to let Mrs. Favor die, and the hero fires at him, barely missing his face and drawing verbal fire from McLaren: “Is that why you want to kill him? . . . To shut him up? So you won’t have to hear about her?” (271). Allen tries to calm her, saying, “It won’t help to get fighting among ourselves.” She replies, “Are we all on the same side?” McLaren takes Tres Hombres’s earlier accusation that she did not mind the suffering she could not see and tums it back at him, suggesting or hoping that he too is moved by the suffering of Audra Favor. However, McLaren also expresses doubt. She worries not that Tres Hombres is practical beyond all feeling but rather that Tres Hombres is actually on a different “side.” Favor has been questioning Tres Hombres’s loyalty to the passengers the whole novel,

95 usually with a great deal of racist rhetoric to support his claims, but McLaren’s question, partly because her motives seem so genuine, points to the novel’s fundamental division of interests. And this division finally becomes painfully apparent in another volatile exchange between Ties Hombres and McLaren. McLaren pleads for Tres Hombres to help Mrs. Favor, arguing, “It’s not up to us to decide if she deserves if’ (273). Russell looks out the window as he shapes his cigarette and his response, tums to her, and says: “Go ask that woman what she thinks of human life. Ask her what a human life is worth at San Carlos when they run out of meat” “That isn’t any fault of hers.” “She said those dirty Indians eat dogs. You remember that? She couldn’t eat a dog no matter how hungry she was.” Everybody was watching him. He lit his cigarette and blew out smoke. “Go ask her if she’d eat dog now.” “That’s why?” the McLaren girl said, like it was all clear to her now. “She insulted the poor hungry’ miserable Indians and you’d let her die for that!” Russell shook his head. “We were talking about human life.” “Even if there was no money, nothing to be gained, you’d let her die?” All the McLaren girl’s temper was showing now, and she was just letting it come. “Because she thinks Indians are dirty and no better than animals you’d sit there and let her die!” Russell held the cigarette close to his mouth, watching her. “It makes you angry, why talk about it?”

This exchange, like so many in Leonard’s novel, is rich with implications regarding heroic motivation, not least of which is McLaren’s appeal to religion: “It’s not up to us to decide if she deserves it.” McLaren argues that we help people not based on their merit but rather just because it is the right thing to do, and it is easy to insert “Christian” for “right” since McLaren implies that larger forces deal with questions of who “deserves” what treatment. But McLaren’s appeal to a higher judge is finally ironic given that Dr. Favor, the novel’s model for letting people suffer who do not deserve it, is a Doctor of Divinity. Dr. Favor succinctly personifies the historical relationships between the Christian mission, genocide, and imperialism, so, with this character as the novel’s most explicitly Christian model, it is hard not to read at least some doubt into moral codes that leave judgments of merit to higher laws. In fact, this exchange between Tres Hombres and McLaren reveals one of Hombre’s most significant observations about heroism; i.e., blind heroism is less valuable than heroism aware of who will benefit. However, I do not

96 contend that Hombre is didactic in its argument about heroism and merit, implied in Tres Hombres’s refusal to help the ex-soldier, Dr. Favor, and Mrs. Favor. In fact, even as McLaren uncovers the culturally and politically informed sources of Tres Hombres’s reluctance to help, she is appalled that he would let Audra Favor bum in the sun to prove a point: “Even if there was no money, nothing to be gained, you’d let her die?” (273). The aforementioned dialogue reveals that Hombre is more an exploration of the subjective qualities of heroism than a meditation on its essential qualities. At the center of this subjective heroism are the influences of racial and cultural alliances and racism. Racism is the constant source of tension in Hombre. and racial and cultural alliances inform heroic motivations. But Tres Hombres holds no monopoly on racially and culturally motivated heroism, as McLaren reveals when she finally breaks down and talks, or rather screams, about her captivity: I want to talk about it... I would like you to ask me what I think a human life is worth . . . a dirty human Apache life. Go on, ask me. Ask me about the ones that took me from my home and kept me past a month. Ask me about the dirty things they did, what the women did when the men weren’t around and what the men did when we weren’t mnning but were hiding somewhere and there was time to waste. I dare you to ask me! (273-274)

When no one responds she continues to talk about the family she has not seen in two months and her brother, asking Tres Hombres, “Do they just kill little boys who can’t defend themselves?” (274). Tres Hombres replies, “If they don’t want them.” In Hombre the Apaches are not the only people who have suffered, as McLaren’s outburst exemplifies. But, partly because of her suffering, McLaren’s motivations, like those of Tres Hombres, suddenly seem quite subjective. Moreover, Tres Hombres’s responses to McLaren’s accusation that he would let Audra die to make a point and to her outpouring of anger about her captivity are cold but telling in terms of the novel’s themes. “It makes you angry, why talk about it?” Tres Hombres tells her (273). And, colder still, he replies to her question about her brother’s life with the ostensibly practical response, “If they don’t want them” (274). As is the case throughout the novel, these cold responses speak to larger issues. “If they don’t want them” is a deliberately cold response to the life of a child, but, by suggesting that there are things about Apache values that none of the

97 white people have attempted to understand, the response also criticizes the lack of a Native perspective, not to mention the inhumane relocation of “unwanted” Indians to reservations. “It makes you angry, why talk about it?” mobilizes the deeds-not-words heroism of male action formulas in the service of critiquing the worst sort of failure, the failure to observe the suffering of others and act. The final irony of McLaren’s accusations is that even if she accuses Tres Hombres of callousness to human life for his reluctance to save Mrs. Favor it seems equally easy for her not to think of how many lives at San Carlos would be saved by the meat money. Furthermore, “It makes you angry, why talk about it?” speaks to the refusal to talk about the unpleasant in general, about McLaren’s captivity and about the suffering of the Apaches at San Carlos, about the stolen meat money, about the fact that Audra Favor is only slightly less reprehensible a bigot than her husband Dr. Favor, and finally about the fact that Tres Hombres refuses to help, not solely out of hurt feelings for the Apaches, but also out of the material necessity of the meat money for the starving Indians. Given that the material conditions of the Apaches stem from values as well, e.g., from the Favors’ indifference to Apache lives, Tres Hombres’s refusal to help Audra is hardly petty. Rather, his refusal to help is a counter-example of the connection between values and human suffering. Tres Hombres eventually agrees to the help Audra, but not before he offers the money to the others, daring them to take it down and exchange it for Mrs. Favor but warning them that whoever takes it will be killed by the bandits. He even throws his Apache moccasins at McLaren, telling her to wear them: “You mn faster when they start shooting” (270).After no one responds, Audra Favor begins to scream for her husband again, her “words coming like a long moan” (280). Then, after she quiets, Tres Hombres stands, the others watching and “knowing he was about to do something” (281). Before going down the hill, he asks Allen to cover him with the Spencer when the shooting

This line is a fine joke on the image of Apaches as great runners, an image to which Leonard returns in the novel Forty Lashes Less One, but also a rebuttal to the others’ assumption that the hero’s reluctance is out of indifference or cowardice. McLaren, Tres Hombres argues, will run too when she sees that the bandits are not really offering them a genuine choice. 98 starts, and he calls Allen “Man,” implying the initiate has earned the gun (281). Allen worries about shooting a bandit in the back, to which Tres Hombres responds, “I’ll ask him if he’ll tum around,” a final lesson about heroism: “Look,” I said, “I just don’t understand what’s going to happen. That’s what I’m talking about.” “You’ll see it,” Russell said. He thought a minute. “Maybe you have to see something else. TTie money—that it gets up to San Carlos.” “Look, if you’d just explain—” He touchai my arm. “Maybe it’s you who has to take it up to San Carlos after. That’s easy, uh?” I kept staring at him. “You never were keeping it for yourself, were you?” He just looked at me—like he was tired—or like what was the use explaining now? (281-282) McLaren throws the moccasins back at Tres Hombres and jokes, “You mn faster when they start shooting” (283). He smiles and they agree to “talk more sometime” when “things calm down.” Tres Hombres descends the hill and dies in a gunfight, saving Mrs. Favor and the others. Carl Allen never gets to cover Tres Hombres because Audra Favor, untied and ascending the hill before the shooting starts, stands between Allen and the action: “She stood there. She tumed around to watch what was happening below and did not move from the spot” (286). The most important subde detail of Tres Hombres’s heroism is that he not only delivers Mrs. Favor and the others from the bandits, but, by asking Allen to deliver the money to the Apaches at San Carlos, he heroically fulfills his obligation to the Indians and forces the initiate Allen to act on the Indians’ behalf. Furthermore, he proves to the others that his reluctance to give up the money is not out of self-interest but rather interest in the Apaches’ well-being If this ending seems excessively neat, pleasing the interests of all in one act of heroic death, the passengers again miss part of the point. A spirit of reconciliation attends the parting words of Tres Hombres and McLaren, implying that some day when “things calm down” their bond may model a search for common humanity in the Indian Wars (283). But once Tres Hombres has died McLaren’s best effort to understand him is to insist that Sweetmary deputy J. R. Lyons give him a Christian burial: “The McLaren girl said look all you want, but keep your opinions; we were taking Russell to Sweetmary for proper burial with a Mass and all and if Mr. J. R. Lyons didn’t like it he didn’t have to attend” (288). McLaren herself has looked at Tres Hombres quite a bit, but, 99 unfortunately, she has maintained her opinions about heroism and has memorialized the hero as a Praying Indian, just as the narrator Carl Allen has probably missed the point as well. Allen writes in closing, “You can look at something for a long time and not see it until it has moved or run off. That was how we looked at Russell. Now, nobody questioned why he had walked down that slope. What we asked ourselves was why we ever thought he wouldn’t” (288). Allen’s assertion that “nobody questioned why he walked down that slope” implies either that they all “Now” understand or that they “Now” no longer care to ask. The former leaves a mystery for the reader, who really does not know if the others understand Tres Hombres or not The latter implication, however, suggests that they have not really learned anything about Tres Hombres at all and no longer care to try. The Christian burial along with the passengers’ insistence, even in the end, on calling Tres Hombres “Russell” are the result of perspectives that limit the hero’s identity. It is fitting that Allen is less concerned with the mistakes they have made about Tres Hombres’s cultural values than with the mistakes they have made about whether he would walk down the slope. The narrator’s questions about heroism, questions driving his narrative and driving him to report that Tres Hombres called him “Man” during their last exchange, are answered by Allen and McLaren in a way that subsumes the man of plural cultural identities beneath a Eurocentric definition of heroism. Here the novel, by foregrounding the consistent limitations in the characters’ definitions of heroism and observations of Tres Hombres, becomes a reflexive smdy of the potentially assimilationist qualities of western heroism and of the problem of essentialist notions of heroism at large. As such Hombre the novel departs from Allen’s narration and suggests the power of a popular gerue to interrogate the relationship between cultural diversity, subjectivity, narrative, and generic conventions; therefore, the novel’s critique of the western also serves as its greatest advertisement for the political potential of the genre. Hombre’s interrogation of racial assimilationism anxieties through the reluctance of the hero, however, is finally more pronounced and more fulfilling than its interrogation of gender stereotypes. As is the case with “The Colonel’s Lady,” most of Hombre’s gender themes fuse issues of race and gender around the idea of captivity, undermining some 100 assumptions about the limits of female agency but potentially scapegoating white femininity for the racism at the heart of abduction plots. Captivity narrative itself is such an old and broad genre of literary communication that it is probably most productive to approach Leonard’s uses of the captivity theme through his own milieu and particularly through films of the 1950s since film clearly influenced Leonard’s Hombre and other works.

John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), perhaps the 1950’s most discussed western film, builds its anxieties about heroism and miscegenation on an explicit foundation of captivity narrative, as do numerous film westerns of the decade from Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow (1950) to Don Siegel’s Flaming Star (1960). Likewise, both abduction plots and adoption plots, like those surrounding the character Quint Asper (Burt Reynolds) on T.V.’s Gunsmoke and the orphan (Audrey Hepburn) in John Huston’s The Unforgiven (1960), are often read as similar reflections of the era of bus boycotts and National Guard intervention in Southern schools. In fact, in the case of Flaming Star and The Unforgiven biracial parentage and adoption become thinly veiled variations on abduction, as characters are asked to sublimate part of their cultural identity to the point of being captives of white culture. In Flaming Star, for example, the biracial character, suitably played by racially ambiguous cultural icon Elvis Presley, must choose between the Kiowa community of his mother and the white community of his father during a particularly tense moment of Indian- white relations, leading him to a moment of agonizing stasis at the border of two cultures. This is a common ploy of “tragic mulatto” plots and Indian-white miscegenation plots but also a variation of the captivity plot suggesting the character’s unwillingness to participate in white culture, a case of art anticipating the real-life events looming on the horizon, e.g., the 1974 “abduction” of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

Devlin astutely notes the influence of the film Shane on Leonard’s novel Last Stand at Saber River and High Noon on “Three-Ten to Yuma." Delmer Daves’s film version of 3:10 to Yuma (19571 makes plain the influence of High Noon, concentrating on the earlier film’s attention to the clock and to the hero’s palpable danger. Geherin, Devlin, and Challen all note the importance of films on Leonard’s writing. In addition to the aforementioned connections, for instance, Leonard’s lynching story “No Man’s Guns” (1955) is obviously indebted to either Walter Van T. Clark’s novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) or to “Wild Bill” Wellman’s film version (1943), both of which explored paranoia and false accusation before McCarthyism and laid the generic groundwork for “Red Scare” allegories High Noon. Nicholas Ray’s Johnnv Guitar (1954), and Allan Dwan’s Silver Lode (1954). 101 Hombre explores the variation on captivity narrative where abduction and adoption become inverted terms in great detail. First, Tres Hombres treats his boyhood abduction by Apaches as adoption and his subsequent adoption by James Russell of Contention as captivity. Secondly, the novel inverts the captivity plot of “The Colonel’s Lady” by revealing that the passengers’ implicit captivity by Tres Hombres in the desert is, in fact, their only means of survival. Moreover, the novel suggests that McLaren’s captivity by Apaches may actually make her a heroine more equipped for the rigors of desert survival. Lastly, the novel inverts the cîçtivity plot by using Mrs. Favor, the conventional model of white femininity, to symbolize the destruction of Tres Hombres and of a Native American perspective in Allen’s narrative. While the first two of these inversions should be clear in my discussion of Hombre so far, the latter two, i.e., McLaren’s abduction as education and the white female Audra as racist destroyer, merit further explanation. After Tres Hombres reveals that he was with the reservation police, both Dr. Favor and Allen immediately think of the women in the coach, suggesting that Tres Hombres, if Apache, may make the women feel unsafe: ‘1 heard Dr. Favor say something to his wife; the sound not the words. She told him not to be silly. I asked the McLaren girl if she was comfortable. She said, yes, thank you” (196). The men obviously project their own anxieties onto the women; Allen has already admitted, “I wasn’t at all pleased about Russell sitting in the same coach,” and Dr. Favor is the one who asks that Tres Hombres ride on top (189,200). Both Allen and Dr. Favor underestimate the women at first, as Allen soon begins to discover There was Mrs. Favor saying it was hot, saying it different ways, but not seeming to mind it... There was the McLaren girl, seeming to be the most patient, aside from Russell ( how could it bother him to be out here), and Dr. Favor who watched Mendez, trying to hurry him with his eyes. (205) The power of observation is symbolized in Favor’s attempts to move Mendez by looking at him, and Allen, as usual, struggles to observe, not only noting that the women tolerate the journey with little complaint but also noting that McLaren is second only to Tres Hombres in patient forbearance of the harsh climate. Later, Allen notes, “For a thin little seventeen- year-old girl [McLaren] was tougher than most men and I think you know that by now” (274). McLaren, like the conventional heroine of captivity narrative, is strengthened by the

102 experience. Also, her association with Tres Hombres, through Allen’s admiration of their abilities to survive and through the constant ideological conflict between the two, implies an affinity between McLaren and Ties Hombres that the others may not entirely understand. Both have, in fact, lived with Apaches, though they have formed different opinions about their experiences. Hombre’s most significant variation on the captivity plot, however, may be the captivity and restoration of Mrs. Audra Favor. Mrs. Favor, the beacon of white femininity in Hombre. is presented early in the novel as a racist who makes judgments about the behavior of reservation Apaches with absolute indifference to Apache suffering. As a western heroine, Mrs. Favor is the generic heir of Mrs. Mallory in John Ford’s Stagecoach. More generally, however, Mrs. Favor is an example in a long line of puritanical or Victorian prudes who are often scapegoated in the western for social bigotry and moral hypocrisy, character types who are opposed to “dance hall girls” with hearts of gold and to the brute honesty of the western’s heroes. Audra, like many Victorian women in the western, is a hypocritical example of decency at best. Though well-manicured, pretty, and impeccably tasteful, Audra Favor is not entirely a hothouse flower. She sexualizes the Indians even as she describes her disgust, and she actually flirts with the badman Frank Braden. Most importantly, she is, like her husband, a bigot utterly oblivious to human suffering, and her failure to look well upon the Apaches is more selfish than it is naive. Nevertheless, Audra Favor is also a victim of the failed promise of white patriarchy, quite literally so when Dr. Favor refuses to rescue his own wife. Mrs. Favor is less active in her own rescue than Mrs. Darck is, and Mrs. Favor is less calculated as well. This change reflects Hombre’s agenda, which centers on problematizing the captor while “The Colonel’s Lady” problematizes the captive. Hombre is eager to explore female assertiveness through Mrs. Favor and especially through McLaren but more eager to explore racism, and, therefore, Mrs. Favor is more a symbol of white femininity no longer worth saving than she is a female agent in the plot. Perhaps the most overt instance of Audra as symbol occurs when she is tied in the hot sun as ransom. Her slowly burning flesh becomes currency in exchange for the Apaches’ meat money, and this notion of flesh as currency speaks to the novel’s larger race and gender themes as well. 103 In terms of race, Audra’s burning skin symbolically ties her suffering and skin color to that of the Apaches and serves as a constant reminder that this is no simple matter of saving Audra but rather a matter of exchanging Indian lives for hers. In terms of race and gender, the white flesh of an abducted woman is again on the symbolic market, though the captors now are white and the potential savior Apache. Not only does Hombre interrogate the value of Mrs. Favor by foregrounding the racist ideology at the heart of the captivity plot and by introducing the potential value of the meat money to the Apaches, but Mrs. Favor is also specifically tied to the failed observations in both Allen’s narration and the novel’s racially charged subjectivities. This is especially evident when she stands in Allen’s sights before Tres Hombres dies: I stood up and waved my arm, but as I did she was looking back the other way again. Even standing and sighting down with the Spencer against the side frame, the Favor woman was still in the way. I could only see part of the Mexican. In my mind I kept telling her over and over again to get out of the way, to please, for the Lord’s sake move one way or the other and to hurryl Now, right now, just move or look up here again or sit down or do somethingl She stood there. She tumed around to watch what was happening below and did not move from the spot. Braden, his left hand still holding his thigh, straightened the grainsack with his boot toe so that the open end was toward him. Russell watched. (286)

Allen’s looking through the sights of the Spencer and Tres Hombres’s looking at Braden are opposed to Mrs. Favor’s looking, a spectator outside the action of her own restoration whose spectatorship literally disrupts this action. This may be Leonard’s most intriguing reference to looking in the novel, revealing a great deal of generic self-consciousness on the part of the author. Audra’s looking exemplifies the connection between subjectivity, narrative, genre, race, and gender central to the novel all along. Audra Favor’s captivity is the cause of the death of the “Good Indian” Tres Hombres, but her looking is the more immediate cause. In terms of the racial themes of the novel it is significant that Mrs. Favor is a racist who fails to look well upon the Apaches at San Carlos. In terms of the generic and narrative themes of the novel it is also significant that her looking, while temporarily opposed to Allen’s more practical purpose for looking, mirrors Allen’s reporting of the events in general. Mrs. Favor observes the hero and limits the hero in the most material 104 way by contributing to his death, but Allen and McLaren limit the legend of Tres Hombres as much as Mrs. Favor ends his life. Moreover, it is also worth noting that while Mrs. Favor may serve as Leonard’s scapegoat for the failure to look well upon the hero, she may just as easily serve as Allen’s excuse for not saving Tres Hombres since the reader is completely reliant upon his report of the events. In the context of the late 1950s and early 1960s western, Hombre’s treatment of Audra Favor is not entirely unusual. A number of westerns of the period explore women who are not adequately served and/or male heroes reluctant to save morally suspect damsels. In many ways the westerns of the period anticipate both Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mvstique (1963) and the opposing backlash to women’s liberation later in the decade. This is fitting since Friedan’s now classic book explores a problem bom well before 1963, a problem that “lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women” (15). And just as the women’s magazines and debates of male psychiatrists in the 1950s preface and legitimize Friedan’s observations, so too do the westerns of the period, where men who refuse their responsibilities abound and women are explicitly failed by the patriarchal contract. In the novel Welcome to Hard Times (1960), for example, author E. L. Doctorow presents a western landscape where male authority cannot protect female citizens from sexual violence, a violence bom in the very conventions of male heroic behavior that purport to protect the female characters. In the novel, town patriarch Blue resists acting heroically within the same categories of violent male behavior that bring the Badman from Bodie to rape, kill, and bum the town to the ground, but recognizing the violence at the center of westem masculinity does little to help Blue protect the town, and especially the town’s women, from this violence. Audra Favor is finally failed by her husband but not by Tres Hombres. Nevertheless, as I have shown, Tres Hombres is potentially failed by her and by the myth of white femininity, which, as currency in the exchange of the captive for the meat money, symbolizes a long generic assault on Native people. As I have also shown, Hombre is In Elmore Leonard’s short story “The Captives” (I955L a bridge between Ford’s Stagecoach and Hombre and the source for Budd Boetticher’s film The Tall T (1957), a woman is abandoned by her cowardly man when their stage is taken by bandits. Her husband actually suggests that she be used as ransom. The story’s hero, who encourages her to trust herself, becomes her new man after they fight the bandits together. 105 itself quite generic, integrating and/or opposing westem conventions of gender and race. Women and people of color both lose, to a certain degree, at the end of Hombre: the compensation, however small or large, is that the incompatibility of the westem hero’s Apache sympathies with the ideology of the damsel makes self-conscious use of the generic conventions to explore the relationship between genre, gender, and racial assimilation. Audra Favor is a sc ^ g o a t in this exploration, but the other characters’ misreadings of Tres Hombres are no less obvious, and the other examples of assimilation interrogated by the novel include Allen’s narrative and the westem itself. One last figure associated with assimilationism in Hombre bears mentioning, so in the spirit of closing observations on the novel I will discuss Henry Mendez. In Hombre— and to varying degrees in “Only Good Ones,” Valdez is Coming, and Fortv Lashes Less One—Mexican and Mexican-American characters and culture frequently symbolize border relationships and the potential for assimilation. In Hombre Henry Mendez is the voice of assimilation encouraging Tres Hombres to live and speak like a white man: “Which name today?” Mr. Mendez said. “Which do you want?” Russell answered Mr. Mendez in Spanish then, just a few words, and Mr. Mendez said, in English, “We use John Russell. No symbol names. No Apache names. All right?” When Russell just nodded, Mr. Mendez said, “I was wondering what you decided. You said you would come to Sweetmary in two days.” Russell used Spanish again, more this time, evidently explaining something. “Maybe it would look different to you if you thought about it in English,” Mr. Mendez said and watched him closely. “Or if you spoke about it now in English.” (167) This quotation concisely combines the novel’s themes of naming, language, and racial assimilation. Henry Mendez encourages the use of English and the name “Russell,” and Mendez’s suggestions nicely serve Allen’s interests as narrator since Allen calls the hero “Russell” in this passage and cannot follow the Spanish dialogue. This passage is most noteworthy for its explicit foregrounding of assimilationist pressures. Tres Hombres’s silent nod is a marriage of the conventional silence of the westem hero with the forced silence of hegemonic language and naming practices, and the hero’s stubborn use of Spanish is also a criticism of Mendez’s eagerness to assimilate. It is fitting that one of the

106 bandits is called “the Mexican,” for this name shows both Allen’s disinterest in knowing the Mexican and that to be named for one’s national or racial culture, when a person of color, is to be an outlaw. The assimilationist tendencies of Mendez emerge again and again throughout Hombre to compliment the novel’s other instances of assimilationism. For example, when McLaren rescues Dr. Favor, and Dr. Favor chalks the rescue up to white racial superiority, Mendez temporarily slips from his assimilationist pose into a militant sympathy with Tres Hombres before correcting himself and resituating his alliances with “all” the passengers: “You will learn something about white people,” [Dr. Favor] said to Russell. “They stick together.” “They better,” Mendez said. “We all better.” Just for a second there was the old tell-nothing Henry Mendez talking. It sounded good after seeing the other side of him for two days. (260) Carl Allen, as usual, seems to miss the point, opposing Mendez speaking up with his silence but without noting the racial overtones in Mendez’s warning “They better.” Given the position of Mendez as assimilationist in the plot and themes of the novel, and given Allen’s inclination to miss most of this tension, the novel’s last lines take on greater significance, as Allen’s summary of the need to take a “good look” at “Russell” not only appropriates Tres Hombres one last time with hegemonic narration but also appropriates Mendez: “Take a good look at Russell. You will never see another one like him as long as you live.” That first day, at Delgado’s, Henry Mendez said it all. (289) The irony is that Henry Mendez does not say it all, even though he articulates the novel’s most salient theme. Henry Mendez speaks for Allen, and this is a certain power, but he does so in the service of Allen’s narration, which finally speaks for Mendez and Tres Hombres insofar zis Allen controls the reporting of the events. However, there are still those subtle moments of possibility for Mendez to break free from the assimilationist trap. When he slips and says, ‘They better,” that is one. And, perhaps most in favor of Mendez’s potential, as Tres Hombres prepares for his final act of problematic heroism, Allen writes, “Mendez said something in Spanish and Russell answered also in Spanish, shmgging his shoulders” (282). The assimilationist slips one more past the narrator and, therefore, past the dominant ideology of Allen’s text. 107 Throughout my reading of Hombre I have relied on the name Tres Hombres to represent the plurality of the hero, a plurality Allen’s narration and the events of the novel frequently seek to suppress. I should end, however, by admitting the limitations of even this plural name, a Mexican name earned while fighting Apaches. Leonard writes that mule packers who the hero saved during a skirmish with Apaches “told how this one had fought like three men against ten times as many of the barbarians” (196). Biologically, the hero is “one-part Mexican” and “three-parts white,” bom “Juan something” before becoming “Ish- kay-nay” after being taken by Chiricahua Apaches during a raid (171, 195). While Tres Hombres’s cultural alliance with the Apaches challenges any essentialist notions of race as a biological category, it is important that his most plural name is not Apache but Mexican, placing him at the cultural border with Mendez. It is also important that he claims his opposition to white ideology through the Apaches rather than his Mexican heritage. This is noteworthy both because it exemplifies Leonard’s reduction of the Mexican to a character type symbolic of border relationships and because it locates counter-hegemonic possibilities with the Apaches. A biological Mexican identifies with the Apaches to argue for an Apache perspective and, at least implicitly, a Mexican perspective as well. Perhaps the greatest plurality of Leonard’s hero is this complicated relationship of cultural identification and anti-assimilationist ideology. However, the origin of the plural title, i.e., as an Indian killer, speaks not only to the motives of the hero, since it is easy to read guilt into Tres Hombres’s empathy with the Apaches, but also to the strain with which one hero can even be named to serve the myriad interests in a time of radical revolutions in the American racial landscape. This is the ambiguity of Hombre and the ambiguity with which I choose to end this reading of Leonard’s westem novel, the story of muchos hombres in one body and a generic character type struggling to accommodate. David Geherin notes what he calls Leonard’s “sympathetic portrayal of the Apaches”: “Though often used to provide impetus for the plot, the Apaches are never presented simply as screaming, bloodthirsty savages, never used simply as embodiments of the evil the good guys must battle” (25). Certainly, Leonard’s Apaches, like all of his characters, are rarely two dimensional. Even when a character remains underdeveloped, like the Lipan woman in “Only Good Ones,” Leonard frequently foregrounds this as some 108 thematic point and/or stractures the action to make an issue out of what is missed by the other characters who fail to see the depth of that character. The self-conscious use of character subjectivity in Hombre and other Leonard westerns partly meets these needs, as characters see, read, or imagine themselves and others, often through subjective lenses focused by cultural difference and privilege. The westem hero is central to this discussion, because the hero’s actions are so thoroughly filtered through these subjective lenses, and his actions also finally seek to redress misperceptions that in the 1960s were at the heart of sociopolitical turmoil and promise. Leonard’s westerns, despite often complex efforts to interrogate the primacy of masculinity in the formula westem, remain male-centered insofar as their westem heroes are men. The women, though outspoken to the point of revisionism, are still marginalized. Likewise, despite efforts to the contrary, Leonard’s attempts at anti-racist revisionism are riddled with contradictions. It is the contradictions, however, that make Leonard’s westems rich examples of the strain with which white, male artists twisted the westem geru-e and the westem hero to accommodate myriad sociopolitical interests in the decade. Leonard the man is hard to find in his books, deferring to the strategy “let it happen naturally” (Geherin 132). Nonetheless, careful reading of Leonard’s Hombre reveals a number of themes hinging on issues of race and gender and the ability of the genre’s hero to serve multiple perspectives. It is a tribute perhaps to the genre and to Leonard’s faith in the genre that, even after following Harper’s advice and moving on to crime writing with The Big Bounce (1969) and The Moonshine War (19691. Leonard reserved the westem settings of Valdez is Coming (19701. Fortv Lashes Less One (1972), and Joe Kidd f 19721 for his most thorough explorations of race politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s period of his development. The westem and the westerner always fail to adequately meet the ambitious demands of the author’s revisionism, but the failures themselves stand as examples of the relationship between the westem and sociopolitical change. The reluctance of Leonard’s heroes speaks to sociopolitical interests that are all over the place in Leonard’s time; this reluctance especially speaks to anti-assimilationist concems at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement that would go on to become the late 1960s separatism of Black Power. If the revolt against assimilationism is most often 109 associated with post-1965 race politics, this revolt was already in the air in the early 1960s in work by perceptive artists like James Baldwin and Charles Mingus. One need only read Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) or listen to Mingus’s Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (1960) with its infamous “Original Faubus Fables” to experience the growing anger of African Americans tired of waiting for white America to let them assimilate. Leonard’s anti-assimilationist politics may or may not be informed specifically by Civil Rights, but it is clear that Leonard perceptively read the racial tensions surrounding 1950s abduction and adoption plots as indicative of what characters of color lose in assimilating to white interests. The reluctance of Leonard’s heroes is also unusual, however, in that Leonard’s emphasis on heroes of color defines this reluctance according to an anti-assimilationist politics where the “dirty work” of heroism lies in submitting to white power. Other white, male artists of the 1960s locate heroic reluctance not in heroes of color but in white heroes, with varying results, and the dirty work of heroism becomes not the character of color’s fear of assimilating but rather the white hero’s impossible mission of serving multiple sociopolitical constituencies. In the next section, I read Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965) as just such an impossible mission, and I explore the hero’s reluctance as a self- conscious foregrounding of the self-interest lurking behind the hero’s assimilation of multiple regional and racial divisions into a single mission.

110 CHAPTER4

“NEVER STOPPED SEARCHING”: POLITICS AND THE PECKINPAH HERO

In Chapter Three the reluctance of Leonard’s hero stems from a fear of being assimilated into the service of white interests. Sam Peckinpah’s hero, however, represents white interests. Nevertheless, the choice of Peckinpah’s hero is not directly between white interests and the interests of people of color, though racism is often an issue. Rather, Peckinpah’s hero must choose between self-interest and sociopolitical commitment to something larger than himself, and the sociopolitical option in Peckinpah’s films usually comes in the form of a political underdog. Peckinpah’s hero is often running away from something but ends up running into heroic glory, and Peckinpah’s films draw attention to their heroes’ evasions of responsibility to the degree that these heroes’ final heroic acts are often ironic or even superficial. Therefore, the reluctance in Peckinpah’s westems operates on at least two levels. At the first level, Peckinpah’s heroes are reluctant to serve collective sociopolitical interests, concentrating instead on themselves, though not without a great deal of guilt. In this first respect Peckinpah’s heroes often move beyond reluctance to outright sociopolitical evasion, either unwilling to believe that they can make a difference or, as in Maior Dundee (1965), utterly indifferent to others. At the second level, Peckinpah’s films themselves are reluctant to believe that their westem heroes can make a difference, and these films’ self-reflexive indictments of the sociopolitical limitations of the formula hero frequently wallow in sociopolitical cynicism and generic self-loathing. In this chapter I concentrate on Peckinpah’s Maior Dundee as an example of the Peckinpah hero’s evasion of responsibility and the Peckinpah film’s cynicism about the sociopolitical potential of the hero. Because Major Dundee is a convoluted plot involving numerous cultural divisions, I read this film in detail before moving on in the next chapter 111 to Peckinpah’s more successful refinement of heroic themes. The Wild Bunch (1969). Mainr Dundee, with all its flaws, is a perfect place to start a discussion of Peckinpah’s heroes, his self-reflexive strategies for exploring the failures of westem heroism, and his growing image in the 1960s as an outlaw hero of the cinema himself. Moreover, because of its interests in cultural border crossings, especially into Mexico, Major Dundee lays the groundwork for future Peckinpah excursions into his favorite setting for sociopolitical revolution and heroic retreaL The following chapter is divided into sections. The first introduces some critical responses to Peckinpah’s politics and Peckinpah’s image of Mexico. The second section introduces problems of approaching Major Dundee that stem fi’om its contentious production and its politics, and this section is followed by a detailed summary of the film. Next, I explore three border crossings in the film revolving around (1) divisions of North and South, (2) divisions of Caucasian and American Indian, and (3) divisions of U. S. and Mexico, and I concentrate this discussion on Dundee’s use and misuse of perceived cultural types as heroic models. Lastly, I explore the film’s most pressing, though underdeveloped, self-reflexive formal strategies, which involve point of view and narration.

POLITICS AND MEXICO

In Major Dundee the bugler Timothy Ryan narrates: "suddenly we knew we weren’t running away from anything. We were running toward the end of our search.” Dundee’s Cavalry is south of the Rio Grande, and the geographic end of their search is Texas, but Peckinpah’s real search, like that of the men in Maior Dundee, always starts and ends in Mexico. Peckinpah ran away to Mexico for one movie after another, hiding from the turmoil of the United States, the bureaucracy of Hollywood, and the supervision of his

112 financiers. He hid from responsibility by investing his projects with so much dedication that few of life’s problems mattered beyond the limited universe of Peckinpah sets, which were dysfunctional families governed by loyalties and divisions sealed in blood. Peckinpah himself, in a 1972 Plavbov interview, described Mexico as an antidote to U. S. politics: Here in this country, everybody is worried about stopping the war and saving the forests and all that, but these same crusaders go out die door in the morning forgetting to kiss their wives and water the flowers. In Mexico they don’t worty so goddamn much about saving the human race or about the wheeling and dealing that’s killing us. (qtd. in Miller 4) It is no doubt due to comments like these that a number of critics read Peckinpah’s Mexico as a spiritual/domestic space rather than as a political space. For instance, describing the Mexico of The Wild Bunch. Mark Crispin Miller (1975) writes, “the victimized Mexicans are not figures in a political allegory, but figments of a spiritual idyll. Mexico unspoiled by machismo and greed is a paradise of simple domesticity and young love” (4). David Thomson (1981) also describes the spiritual dimension of Peckinpah’s borders: “What border? Does it matter, so long as it’s poised between chance and fate?” (41). Certainly, Peckinpah’s borders are personal, spiritual, and finally largely symbolic, but so are the borders of culture. Whatever the personal character of borders and, in particular, Mexico in Peckinpah’s films, it is impossible to ignore that the sympathetic Mexicans in the plots of Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch are embroiled in class revolution and resistance to imperialism. In fact, just as Peckinpah’s association of Mexico with simple family values implies Mexico is an idyllic alternative to political news in the U. S., Peckinpah’s interest in international issues just as often became a way for him to avoid kissing the wife and watering the flowers. Domestic bliss of Mexico aside, biographer David Weddle (1994) notes that the director used Mexico and other cultural spaces to avoid not only national crises but responsibilities of family as well. According to Weddle, Peckinpah supported eighteen children, including “South Koreans, Mexicans, and American Indians,” for sixteen years through international charities, while “his relationships with his own children continued to deteriorate” (227-228). In fact, to read a split between the spiritual/domestic side and the sociopolitical in Peckinpah’s Mexico or his films is to miss how these themes 113 actually operate. Peckinpah’s vision is not consistently either political or domestic. Rather, Peckinpah’s vision is one of potential commitment to and eventual evasion of both spheres, and these spheres are actually related, as femininity, community, and the idyllic are alm ost always intertwined with sociopolitical commitment in Peckinpah’s world. The real tension in Peckinpah’s films, at least with his images of Mexico, is not whether the hero will choose a spiritual or domestic escape over politics but rather whether the hero will commit to the idealized revolutionary space that fuses both the spiritual/domestic and the political. Peckinpah’s heroes almost always seem to know what is right, and in Mexico what is right for Peckinpah is romanticized revolution. The question then often becomes a choice between revolution and self-interest, and herein lies the hero’s potential for commitment or evasion. Therefore, if Peckinpah was fond of hiding in Mexico, it was also the symbolic center of his searching. “I suppose the fact that I never stopped searching”; that, according to Paul Seydor (1995), is how Sam Peckinpah wanted to be remembered. Nevertheless, Peckinpah is remembered differently by different people. One of my former professors, warning me that being drawn to Peckinpah films would come with a price, remembered wanting to reach up and wipe the blood off the screen when he first saw The Wild Bunch. Pauline Kael (1999), who struggled to articulate her attraction-repulsion to Peckinpah from the 1960s up through his slow, inglorious death in Reagan’s Orwellian 1984, writes: “When he was making movies, it felt, for some of us, as if we were watching an ongoing street accident” (98). In an interview with F. Anthony Macklin (1975-1976), Molly Haskell is far less generous: “I’m surprised that people take him that seriously—somehow I can’t take him that seriously as an artist—and that they don’t see that there’s a lot of just sort of homy male stuff going on” (23). Haskell responds to Peckinpah’s notoriously insulated male world, a world that offers up images of explicit misogyny, e.g., the infamous rape scene of Straw Dogs (1971). She also responds to the hyperbole of auteur theory in the 1960s and 1970s, started in France to rescue unsung Hollywood directors with particularly distinctive visions but becoming by the 1960s a style to self-consciously perform. Therefore, Haskell’s dismissiveness of Peckinpah and other macho directors of his

114 generation is a necessary antidote to popular and critical diiector-worship, especially at the time of her book From Reverence to Rape (1974), that protected from critique some of the most disturbingly violent and phallocentric movies Hollywood ever produced. I, however, caimot dismiss Sam Peckinpah. His politics, or apparent politics, have and should remain at the center of debates about his films and the 1960s. Unfortunately, descriptions of Peckinpah’s detractors as “feminists, Marxists, people who get so mad about movie violence that they want to break something,” like those in Richard T. Jameson’s defense of the director (1981), belittle the scope of cultural studies and are actually far more reductive than Haskell’s unapologetic irritation with the angry young boys network of 1960s auteurism. Peckinpah should not be quickly dismissed as an artist suited for cultural analysis, but this is not to say that the epithets hurled at him have been false. Rather, the epithets and Peckinpah’s consistent performance as outlaw auteur are both part of an accurate reading of the director’s sociopolitical relationship to his time and the genre of the westem. In the following analysis, I explore Peckinpah’s westem heroes as figures marking tensions between solipsistic evasion and sociopolitical engagement, a theme most salient and self-referential in Peckinpah’s Mexico westems: Major Dundee (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969), and, the modem western. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). I am not so much interested in “the destmction and reaffirmation of myth,” to borrow John G. Cawelti’s (1978) description of The Wild Bunch (509'). Rather, I am interested in Peckinpah’s Mexico westems, first, as representations of failed attempts to reconcile the westem hero with sociopolitical leftist events of Peckinpah’s time: Civil Rights, class revolution, and, eventually, feminism. Second, I am interested in the relationship between self-reflexivity in Peckinpah’s films and the sociopolitical failures of Peckinpah’s heroes. In this chapter I look at three borders of cultural identity crossed by the Anglo Union Major in the film: (1) Southem outlaw; (2) “renegade” American Indian; (3) Mexican revolutionaiy. In each case, Dundee learns to appropriate perceived characteristics of the cultural type, and his unsuccessful and successful appropriations are marked by a complex series of border motifs, most frequently symbolized by rivers and architecture. There are a number of complicating factors built into these appropriations. In 115 order to be an effective military strategist Dundee must embrace the spirit of Southern outlawry, renegade Indianness, and Mexican revolutionary heroism. However, Dundee’s ability to lead is partly determined by his ability to impose assimilation upon a variety of sociopolitical interests inside and outside his motley band, and this assimilationism destroys members of each group from which he appropriates. Therefore, as Dundee appropriates perceived traits of outlaw, renegade, and revolutionary, he destroys the sources of these traits. In their astute essay on the relationship between American Indians and white masculinity, David Anthony Tyeeme Claric and Joane Nagel (2001) describe the late nineteenth-century “contradictory situation in which some American reformers were busy ‘civilizing’ indigenous people in efforts to turn them into whites, while at the same time other Americans concerned with manhood were busy emulating, or more accurately, simulating Indian men in an effort to revitalize Anglo masculinity” (116). This combined simulation and forced assimilation is at the heart of Major Dundee, including not only the film’s treatment of Apaches but also of Southern whites, African Americans, and Mexicans. I explore the three border crossings above with attention to simulation and forced assimilation. I then explore the film's use of point of view, both as it relates to the film’s narrator Bugler Ryan and to the film’s authorial vision. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the film’s self-reflexive attention to point of view frames the successes or failures of Dundee’s border crossings. However, since Major Dundee’s plot is particularly convoluted and since my readers may not be familiar with the film, I begin with a discussion of the film’s messy production and a detailed summary.

SORTING THROUGH THE MESS OF MAJOR DUNDEE

“Sam Peckinpah’s” Maior Dundee is a narrative and sociopolitical mess of a movie. I am most concerned with the sociopolitical mess, but the movie is analytically impenetrable without some discussion of the narrative mess as well. Why is the film a narrative mess? According to Paul Seydor (1980, 1997) the shooting length and budget of 116 the film were cut by “fifteen days and about a million dollars,” one third of the original budget, just two days before shooting began (69). These cuts contributed to tensions between Peckinpah and producer Jerry Bresler from which the filmmakers and film never recovered. Additionally, Columbia bypassed advance screenings to avoid honoring Peckinpah’s final cut of the film, and in all “fifty-five minutes of material that Peckinpah considered essential” was deleted or not included (72). The director was promised a three- hour roadshow epic by the studio and created an original director’s cut that ran two hours and forty-one minutes. But he was forced to settle for an original release print that, according to Doug McKitmey (1979), ran two hours and fourteen minutes, and his vision is now represented by two hours and two minutes on video (64). However, Maior Dundee fails for reasons beyond loggerheaded infighting between Peckinpah and his financiers. The film’s concept of a motley band of outsiders chasing redemption, self-definition, and Apaches into Mexico belongs on a short list of the most convoluted plots in film history. In attempting to adapt his own story to the screen, Harry Julian Fink’s draft of the script “stopped after 163 pages and covered only about a third of the story,” prompting angry intervention and rewriting by Peckinpah (Seydor 68). Moreover, Charlton Heston, who played Major Amos Dundee, admits that it was never entirely clear what the film was to be about anyway (Fine 84-92). Why is the film a sociopolitical mess and why does this matter? The intentional fallacies awaiting analysis of a project as uncertain as Major Dundee should be enough to send critics running faster than producers away from Peckinpah’s vision. But the care Major Dundee demands of any close reading is worth the effort since part of the film’s failure is bom in its ambition. On one hand, the film seeks to reconcile issues of race, region, nation, and, less obviously, gender by using the mid-1860s to dramatize a variety of sociopolitical crises of the mid-1960s. On the other hand, the film reveals the failure of an individual vision when it comes to accommodating myriad sociopolitical interests, and by doing so Peckinpah’s film draws attention to the limitations of models of western heroism deeply ingrained in the genre. For a Cavalry epic Maior Dundee’s exploration of heroism is unusually oriented toward rebels and outsiders, both

117 voluntary and involuntaiy.^® The film sustains a series of conflicts between patriotic military order and various models of outlawry and disenfiranchisement, conflicts that accumulate to make this structural mess even messier. The film’s hero. Major Dundee, relies on order to maintain power and distance fiom others, but also appropriates outlaw and renegade behavior from those around him in order to satisfy his personal mission. Therefore, Major Dundee’s fiascoes are not simply problems of narrative structure. Rather, Major Dundee fails most interestingly in its cultural border crossings, its attempts to reconcile Amos Dundee’s personal obsessions with his heroic potential as unifier of a volatile national microcosm and liberator of oppressed people.

SUMMARY

The plot begins on November 1,1864 after an entire company of the 5th United States Cavalry has been ambushed and massacred at the Rostes ranch by Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate) and his Apache warriors. The sole European American survivor of the massacre. Bugler Timothy Ryan (Michael Anderson, Jr.), has recorded the incident in his 1864-1865 journal and will ser\'e as the film’s narrator. Major Dundee’s one-armed, half- Apache, civilian scout Mr. Samuel Potts (James Cobum) hands him the scarf of the dead Lt. Brannon, and says, “That’s for you. Major,” indicating that this is a warning from Sierra Charriba but also that the war is being passed from Brannon to Dundee. Dundee is a Virginian and Union officer sent to run a prison at Fort Benlin, the appointment serving as a disciplinary action for his trying to fight his own war at Gettysburg. Surveying the burned buildings of the Rostes ranch, Dundee seizes the opportunity to redeem himself and

Maior Dundee is obviously indebted to Ford's Cavalry trilopv—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950)—a debt that I discuss later in my reading, but Peckinpah’s obsession with outlaws and outcasts reaches outside the Cavalry subgenre and outside the western as well. In fact, Dundee’s band of outsiders are loose ancestors of the criminals-tumed-WWII-heroes in Aldrich’s The Dirtv D 2 ^ ( 1 9 6 7 ) . 118 announces that in five days he will hunt Charriba with the intention of getting back the kidnapped Rostes boys and capturing or killing the Apaches. Although he is aware that he risks a court martial and execution for again trying to fight his own war, Dundee quickly busies himself putting together a haphazard Cavalry of outsiders and misfits. Captain Benjamin Tyreen (Richard Harris) is an Irish immigrant who has been cashiered out of the Union Army by his friend Dundee’s deciding vote for killing a Northern Union man in a duel. At the beginning of the film, Tyreen, now a Confederate, has been captured and held at Dundee’s prison, from which he has escaped with fellow Confederates (played by Peckinpah regulars) O. W. Hadley (Warren Oates), Arthur Hadley (L. Q. Jones), Sgt. Chillum (Ben Johnson), and Jimmy Lee Benteen (John Davis Chandler). When Dundee asks the recaptured Tyreen if “the prospect of serving [his] country’s flag once again seem[s] more attractive than dragging its chains in this prison,” Tyreen responds, “It is not my country. Major Dundee. I damn its flag and I damn you and I would rather hang than serve.” This refusal to serve draws an approving din from the Rebel prisoners. But Tyreen gives in when he and the other escapees find out that a guard they wounded has died and they will be executed. As a result of Tyreen’s change of heart. Major Dundee’s makeshift ranks swell with a large group of Confederate prisoners whose leader Tyreen chooses Union service over death. The tension between the Northern and Southern troops is palpable from the very beginning, and the national and regional wounds are exacerbated when Sgt. Aesop (Brock Peters), an African American, offers the services of his six Union “coloreds,” soldiers sick of playing turnkey to Southerners and laboring inside the prison walls. Adding to the already complex racial makeup of Dundee’s Cavalry, the white and African American Union troops and the white Southerners are joined by civilians, including trackers Mr. Potts and Riago (José Carlos Ruiz), the latter an Apache “praying Indian” or, as he accuses himself of being, a “camp dog.” And Dundee’s resourceful Sgt. Gomez (Mario Adorf), a Mexican American loyal to the Union but with an ambiguous past, complicates the racial dynamic further. Rounding out this Union, Confederate, and civilian backbone are the bumbling artillery man Lt. Graham (Jim Hutton), the

119 revenge-obsessed Reverend Dahlstrom (R. G. Armstrong), the drunken packer Wiley (Slim Pickens), the horse thief Priam (Dub Taylor), and an assortment of what Dundee describes as “thieves, renegades, deserters, you gentlemen of the South.” Dundee orders Graham to steal supplies from a Union train, and the Cavalry sets out for Mexico, where Charriba has fled. On the trail, Ryan bugles a tune, the Confederates sing “Dixie,” the Union soldiers sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the civilians sing “My Darling Clementine” in a cacophony of chauvinism recalling a famous scene in Casablanca (1942) and intimating conflicts to come. On November 18 they approach the Rio Grande and Mexico, warned by Riago who smells the “stink of many white man” that a Confederate patrol rides nearby. Tyreen keeps his word to Dundee and stays with the mission “Until the Apache are taken or destroyed,” and the motley band crosses the Rio Grande and enters Mexico, where tempers immediately flare as Benteen harasses Aesop. Dundee pushes Tyreen in response to the racist turmoil: Tyreen: “We can take care of our own.” Dundee: “If you can you waited too long to do it, all you people, all the way down the line.” An old Apache (Francisco Reyguaera) returns the Rostes children and tells Dundee that Charriba is camped across a nearby river. Warned and aware of a possible trap, Dundee sends the children to safety with Gomez and, while crossing the river, is attacked and defeated by the Apaches. In dire need of food after losing 70% of the group’s stores at the bottom of the river, Dundee orders the attack of a French garrison. The French lancers, under Maximilian I, have seized a town sympathetic with the Juaristas, and Dimdee’s raid inadvertently renders him a revolutionary hero to the Mexican villagers, though he has violated international treaties in the process and found a new enemy in the French. In the village, Dundee and Tyreen fight over Teresa Santiago (Senta Berger), a German woman whose husband was killed for supporting Juarez. The men allow the lancers to escape and leave the village, eventually ambushing and again defeating the French, who exact revenge by brutally killing all of the village except Teresa and some children. The Rebel O. W. Hadley is caught deserting, and, after Dundee orders a firing squad, Tyreen shoots O. W. himself. Following this incident, Tyreen threatens to kill 120 Dundee once the “Apache are taken or destroyed.” Dundee seeks solace beside a river in the arms of Teresa, is wounded in the leg by an Apache arrow, and is saved by the Southerners. Forced to recover in Durango, Dundee betrays Teresa with a prostitute and goes on a drunk, wallowing in self-pity until he is rescued from French spies by Tyreen and the others. He regains his command and tricks Charriba into entering his picket lines for a night raid. The Apache are ambushed by Dundee’s men, and Bugler Ryan kills Charriba. The Apache beaten, Tyreen and Dundee prepare for a fatal contest but are interrupted by attacking French lancers who run them to the Rio Grande, where the African American Aesop, the Southern Irishman Tyreen, and many others die protecting “the colors” of the American flag and Dundee’s mission. Suffering heavy casualties, Dundee’s remaining men enter Texas and Ryan strikes up a tune.

THE SOUTHERN OUTLAW: HEROIC MODELING AND ASSIMILATION

When Dundee calls for volunteers from “thieves, renegades, deserters, you gentlemen of the South,” he reveals his contempt for the Southern prisoners but inadvertently foreshadows tensions underlying his own failures as a heroic leader. Dundee, in his quest for Charriba, will become a thief when he orders Graham to steal supplies from a Union train, a renegade when he disregards his post as jailer, and a deserter when he leaves Fort Benlin. Dundee is also himself a gentleman of the South who deserted his region for his country in the Civil War. The sarcasm of his calling the Southern prisoners “gentlemen” is intended as justification for his own desertion of Southern roots, but this sarcastic comment inadvertently reveals the apparent truth of the title “gentlemen of the South.” From the beginning of the film, Tyreen is presented as a self-styled gentleman and Dundee as socially incompetent. While Dundee’s sarcasm speaks to the possible fraudulence of Tyreen’s image, it also speaks to the Major’s own insecurities as a failed leader and social misfit. The difference between the two men is revealed after Tyreen refuses to serve Dundee and draws riotous approval from the other

121 prisoners. Dundee announces that Tyreen and the other escapees will hang for the murder of the guard, and then the Major walks directly through the mob of Southern prisoners, who part to let him pass. The assuredness of Dundee’s brave march through the mob of his enemies parodies the bumbling L t Graham’s later trepidation about walking through a group of Confederates outside Dundee’s office. Nevertheless, Dundee’s parting of the troops is an utterly ironic testament to his heroic authority when read in the context of Heston’s image at the time. Heston is now most famous for leading the National Rifle Association (NRA), and the conservative politics of his NRA leadership find precedent in his arguments with liberal Ed Asner over Actors Guild policies (Katz 623). But Heston also participated in the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963 and is probably most famous on screen for his portrayal of liberator Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956). Most obviously, the parting of the Southern prisoners resembles Moses parting the Red Sea, but the image is twisted from a symbol of epic leadership to a symbol of division, division at the center of Dundee’s failures as a leader and a person. In his social incompetence and failed leadership, Dundee resembles Henry Fonda’s character Owen Thursday in John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948).^^ In fact, Maior Dundee borrows heavily from Ford’s film, but with notable departures. Phil Hardy calls Fort Apache a “remounting of the Custer myth,” no doubt because the film involves a commander (Henry Fonda) who fails to take seriously the military savvy of the Indians he is fighting (167). Thursday is green, obsessed with protocol, and unable to adapt to social change or change in the battlefield. Though warned by his second-in-command (John Wayne), Thursday fails to take seriously the demands or intelligence of the Apaches, and he leads his men straight into an ambush where he dies bravely but stupidly. The optimism of Ford’s ending, where Wayne’s character honors the bravery of his former commander without mention of his failures, is as ironic as Ford’s later film about historical cover-up The Man Who Shot Libertv Valance n9621. Ford’s ending in Fort Apache is eager to bury its critique of Thursday in heavy-handed patriotism, but it must have been

Jim Kitses (1969), Paul Seydor (1980, 1997), and Michael Bliss (1993) also note connections to Fort Apache (Kitses 146, Seydor 75, Bliss 60). Doug McKinney (1979) and Richard Slotkin (1992) mention both Fort Apache and Ford’s Rio Grande (1950), the latter film reconciling North and South as the Cavalry chases Apaches into Mexico (McKinney 63, Slotkin 562-567). 122 laughable, even to a 1948 audience, to watch a Cavalry officer disparage Cochise and Geronimo to their faces, as Thursday does in one scene. Here too, however, are the roots of the hero’s bravery as much as the roots of his shortsightedness. Ford’s Fort Apache suggests a certain heroism in the bravery of its tragic hero Thursday, but John Wayne’s character is finally the moral center of the film, warning against the dangers of underestimating the enemy but also remaining loyal to the Cavalry. Major Dundee’s equivalent to Wayne’s character. Captain Tyreen, models not so much loyalty to the Cavalry but the importance of one’s word. Tyreen is a gentleman outlaw, in a long line of Southern heroes from Jesse James to John Wesley Hardin. As such, his sign of nobility is his word; order and loyalty to Dundee or the Cavalry are at best secondary and, in fact, in conflict with his Southem sympathies. Therefore, while Fort Apache is a precedent for Major Dundee’s relationship to his second-in-command, Tyreen’s code is less oriented toward military order than that of the John Wayne character in Ford’s film. In fact, Tyreen’s code is grounded in a model of good outlawry existing outside Dundee’s exploitation of military protocol. Nonetheless, whatever Tyreen’s reasons for continuing to serve Dundee, it is clear that Tyreen is essential to Dundee’s leadership. Tyreen points out that Dundee’s vote to have him cashiered out of the Union Army years before was a betrayal of a friend and of Southem honor. Tyreen describes the killing of a Northerner that got him cashiered out as a “duel of honor” and shames Dundee: “You’re Southem bom. You knew what that meant. . . You voted to please the Generals in Washington.” Dundee’s mistake lies in his putting authority before honor to a friend and loyalty to the South, but Tyreen’s “troubles” are more ambiguous. In their cell, the Southemers are trapped by the North, but they are guarded by Aesop’s African American troops, so their oppression is expressed in racialized terms reminiscent, as Jim Kitses points out, of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) (146). While the comparison to Griffith’s anti-Reconstractionist propaganda might imply a similar racism underlying Peckinpah’s film, the race politics of Maior Dundee operate differently. Dundee needs Tyreen’s men and he also needs to find heroic honor outside of the protocol of his position, but Tyreen needs redemption too, not, as Dundee proclaims, for betraying the 123 United States but rather for the legacy of racism lurking at the heart of his system of honor. Both of these needs become clear when Benteen harasses Aesop later in the film. Tyreen intervenes by complimenting the African Americans on their “river crossing” at the Rio Grande, “river crossing” symbolizing the border crossing of Aesop’s men from jail workers to respected soldiers. Like Aesop, Tyreen also has crossed a border, dissociating himself from Southem racism even as his Southem honor brings unity to Dundee’s command which Dundee cannot. Tyreen’s border crossing is a personal victory for the character and reflects tensions of the 1950s and the 1960s, when Northerners, both African American and white, routinely intervened with Southem black leaders in the segregationist South, from the National Guard in Little Rock (1957) to Freedom Summer (1964). Northern intervention in the South in the late 1950s and 1960s is rivaled only by Reconstmction as a source of tension between North and South, hence Tyreen’s comment, “We can take care of our own,” and Dundee’s reply, “If you can you waited too long to do it, all you people, all the way down the line.” However, within the specific context of Major Dundee, much like the larger sociopolitical context, the tension between Tyreen and Dundee is not simply a tension between Southem honor and Northern law, or between Southem racism and Northern enlightenment. Rather, Tyreen’s model of honorable tolerance claims Southem autonomy but also exemplifies Tyreen’s dissociation from the Southerner Benteen’s bigotry, and this dissociation partly represents the film’s amelioration of the racism underlying the Southem gentleman outlaw in an era of Civil Rights. This amelioration may be ideologically necessary for Tyreen to remain a noble Southem outlaw in the eyes of a 1960s audience, and it also seems necessary in order for Tyreen to model leadership to Dundee, who fails to intervene in the racial turmoil of the unit. The pawn in all of this power play is Aesop, who is played by Brock Peters with a great deal of dignity but is not allowed to take control of his own liberation. Reverend Dahlstrom, a violent perversion of Christian abolitionism, is the first to intervene, beating Benteen senseless. He is followed by Tyreen, the good outlaw, while Aesop’s agency in his own defense is rendered unnecessary in the typical spirit of patronizing treatments of race in Hollywood cinema.

124 Tyreen models heroic behavior for Dundee, but his own dissociation from Southem racism becomes a key factor in his ability to serve as a heroic model. As Dundee is given opportunities to imitate Tyreen, the Southem Captain in turn assimilates to please Dundee. This interrelationship is reflected in the architectural imagery of the film. In his cell, Tyreen’s potential entrapment and liberation are symbolized in the ambiguous open- closed nature of the architecture, which is open to the sky, its walls solid enough to hold him but slowly eroding towards the ground. It is also fitting that Peckinpah and company include shots of the Cavalry exiting the gates of the prison from which not only the Southem prisoners are freed but also the African American turnkeys and the jailer Dundee himself, who is, because of the disciplinary nature of his assignment as prison administrator, also a captive. Immediately following this march through the Fort Benlin gates is the crossing of a small stream at night, the first in a series of connections between walls, rivers, and symbolic borders and a hint of the Rio Grande crossing that awaits Dundee’s men. Crossing the Rio Grande is an assertion of military heroism by Aesop and his men, recalling John Ford’s idealism in Sergeant Rutledge (1960) about the potential for military service to provide heroic identity to African American soldiers outside racist categories, though Ford’s film, like Peckinpah’s, certainly operates within racist categories itself. The Rio Grande crossing also represents an important moment of assimilationism in Major Dundee. When Riago smells the stench of a Confederate patrol, Tyreen must choose between escaping to the Confederates and betraying Dundee’s position or keeping his word.20 He keeps his word, letting the Confederates pass. Dundee calls for a tune: “We’ll let those Rebels know there’s a Yankee army come to call.” In response to Dundee’s association of Tyreen’s troops with the “Yankee army,” Tyreen is criticized by his Southem men, replying with the order, “To Mexico you bloody idiot!” This scene preceding the Rio Grande crossing is a complex moment of assimilationism. Tyreen not only sides with Dundee’s Yankee army by keeping his word, but he creates tension between himself and the other Southemers, reverting to an order mixed with an insult to

20 Riago’s association of the Confederates with the “stink” of white men also conspires to locate racism with the South. 125 get the Southem troops moving. Later, Tyreen dissociates himself from Benteen's racism when he compliments Aesop’s men. And earlier, at Fort Benlin, he also dissociates himself from Benteen, who calls Tyreen “Uncle” and shares a plan to get Dundee: Benteen: “... when the time comes we’ll turpentine that chicken-pickin’ Yankee.” Tyreen: “I am not your uncle, you redneck peckerwood.” The use of the term “redneck peckerwood” reappears in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. used again to describe stereotypical “white trash.” The association of the term as an African American description for white people provides an interesting side note, but even without this association Tyreen is clearly summoning classism to dissociate himself from Benteen, the movie’s most explicit racist When Tyreen uses the term “bloody idiot” the dissociation takes on another dimension, not only dissociating Tyreen on grounds of class but using the Eurologism “bloody” to align Tyreen with Europe or, at the very least, the aristocratic South modeled after European tradition. Maior Dundee exposes the ironies at the heart of the scapegoating of lower-class bigotry when Dundee accuses Tyreen of “fighting for a white columned plantation house you’ve never had and never will.” Tyreen puts on airs to dissociate himself from the other Southemers and their racism, a ridiculous proposition given the Southem Aristocracy’s ownership of the institution of American slavery, and Dundee points out the absurdity of Tyreen’s upscale rhetoric. However, the ideology of Major Dundee, wherein Tyreen models honorable behavior for the Major, depends on Tyreen’s dissociation from the South’s most explicit racism. As Tyreen crosses into Mexico, a country where Tyreen fought once before and a country with a great deal of European symbolic baggage, the Southemer claims part of his European heritage to dissociate himself from the Benteens of the South, the “bloody idiots” and “redneck peckerwoods” who supposedly tamish Tyreen’s respectability more than any level of outlawry ever could. Ironically, the very loyalty that Tyreen models for Dundee begins to become undermined as he disowns his own men, an act of assimilation that corresponds with the film’s presentation of Tyreen as a respectable model of heroic behavior. This assimilation of Tyreen to European values, rending him from the most populist Southem potential of his outlaw honor, is also complicated in that Tyreen is an Irish immigrant, conceivably fleeing English persecution.

126 In general, Tyreen models not only loyalty and honor for Dundee, albeit with an irony stemming from his partial disavowal of his own men, but also the ability to adapt, to cross borders of cultural identity when necessary to survive. Dundee is already an outlaw, a misfit, and a racist distrusting Riago because the scout is an Apache, calling Aesop’s men “six coloreds” with a hint of disrespect, and pursuing Sierra Charriba with the cold­ blooded obsessiveness of John Ford’s famous bigot Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in The Searchers (1956). Nevertheless, a great deal of the film conspires to keep Dundee’s bigotry subtext by suggesting that the Southemers are the most obvious bigots, and this filmic conspiracy also focuses the merits of Tyreen’s Southem outlawry, excluding the possible racism of this hero type. Dundee’s outlawry reveals the hypocrisy of his constant exploitation of patriotism and military order to shame Tyreen, but his outlawry is also functional, and the film finds practical merit in the Major’s not playing by the rules he exploits. The more serious flaw in Dundee’s outlaw behavior is that his personal mission is couched in a disregard for others. He is outside of his own command and must rely on Tyreen’s outlawry of honor and loyalty to hold things together. In holding things together, however, Tyreen is dissociated from his men, allowing Dundee to operate outside accountability to the troops while Tyreen constantly struggles to remain uncorrupted by his promise to serve. Therefore, while Tyreen models nobility and accountability for Dundee, Dundee never really learns to simulate this behavior so much as he exploits Tyreen to accomplish the mission. This relationship is particularly clear when O. W. Hadley deserts Dundee’s cavalry at the river. Hadley, played brilliantly by Peckinpah regular Warren Oates, seems withdrawn from the other Southemers as they swim in the river. Then, he disappears but is caught and brought back to Dundee.^! When Dundee calls for a firing squad, Tyreen suddenly shoots Hadley himself. In shooting Hadley, Tyreen reasserts Southem self- control and articulates his own secret leadership of Dundee’s Cavalry. This is another moment of assimilation by Tyreen, drawing some opposition from the Southem troops.

Paul Seydor (1980, 1997) notes that Hadley’s desertion and execution recalls the execution sequence in Howard Hawk’s Red River (19481 in which Tom Dunson (John Wayne) refuses to look up at the deserter, who is on a horse. Maior Dundee borrows this idea and Wayne’s lines, as Dundee says, “I don’t want to look up at him” (75). 127 but it is assimilation complicated by the fact that the gesture asserts Tyreen’s control over his assimilationist border crossing. Of course, this shooting occurs during one of the film’s longest river scenes. Also significant is Hadley’s refusal to get into the river with his Southem compatriots before his desertion. Preceding this scene, Hadley and Aesop share binoculars and a moment of solidarity when they watch the French from a safe distance. Aesop brags: “My boys can take that outfit with one hand tied behind our backs, the walking ones anyway," laughing with Hadley about how the French are soft because they are not from the South. Aesop is specifically referring to black soldiers in the French army, and, while the scene reconciles Hadley and Aesop by finding their common Southemness, this is another obvious moment of assimilationism for Aesop. Aesop dissociates himself from the plight of the black Frenchmen, who, like African Americans, are victims of European imperialism. His segregation of his duties to fighting within his race taint whatever is positive in this scene. Still more, when Aesop uses the phrase “one hand tied behind our backs” he associates his six men with the one-armed, half-Indian Potts, who earlier wrestles Riago with only one arm and is a model of assimilationism in Major Dundee. For all of these reasons, Aesop’s growing friendship with Hadley has a specifically assimilationist tenor for the African American. Nonetheless, Hadley’s ability to admire Aesop strikes through the classist categories of Southem racism established by Tyreen earlier in the movie. Hadley dissociates himself from his Southem peers, including his own brother, and his desertion can also be read as a penance for his own racism outside the sociopolitical microcosm of Dundee’s Cavalry. Hadley is redeemed, then, not by the violence of Dundee’s mission but by attempting to understand Aesop. Therefore, Tyreen’s shooting Hadley himself, while this action reasserts Southem self-control and simultaneously articulates the importance of Tyreen to Dundee’s project, is also a destruction of an alternate model of Southem rebellion, one that finds absolution for the legacy of racism not through classist reliance on European aristocracy or a common imperialistic mission but through human understanding.

128 Most important to Tyreen’s attempt to reseize control by shooting Hadley is his promise that follows: to kill Dundee once Charriba has been taken or destroyed. This promise recalls the duel of honor that got Tyreen cashiered out of the Union army, and if Dundee accepts he will be reclaiming his Southemness by respecting the Southem tradition of the honorable duel. Significantly, after Charriba is defeated and killed, Tyreen and Dundee prepare for the duel only to be interrupted by the French lancers who finally attack the Cavalry at the Rio Grande. Aesop dies bearing the “colors,” the racial symbolism of this term for the flag not lost on the filmmakers. When Aesop falls, Tyreen picks up the flag mid-river, screams like some absurd hero dying to prove an existential point, and suicidally charges the French on the Mexican side. Tyreen’s men watch him die, proud of their leader, and the emphasis on their point of view rearticulates the notion that the Southem outlaw is at the core, both symbolically and literally, of Dundee’s unit. But Tyreen dies saving the Union flag, and this bit of assimilation is accompanied by the fact that the Southem hero dies fleeing Confederate Texas for the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. The importance of the Southem gentleman outlaw is a key to understanding much of the assimilationism and heroic modeling at the heart of Major Dundee. However, Dundee does not so much learn from Tyreen as he exploits the Southem hero. Dundee’s critique of the outlawry and racism of the South is hypocritical, but this critique foregrounds both the nobility and loyalty Dundee’s more selfish brand of outlawry lacks and the problematic racism at the heart of the Southem outlaw image, a racism particularly tense in the mid-1960s. As Civil Rights gave way to Black Power, Peckinpah’s westem, like so much Hollywood product, failed to center the African American, opting instead for the Southem outlaw as dominant heroic agent, but Maior Dundee foregrounds assimilationism and the complex relationship between region, race, nation, and class at almost every turn. While Dundee is offered a model to imitate with Tyreen, he spends more time using Tyreen for selfish ends. Nevertheless, the possibility of simulation lurks in the relationship between the two men, requiring other renegade heroic models to

129 articulate the importance of modeling. Perfiaps most significant in this network of simulation and assimilation is “playing Indian,” a phenomenon I will explore in the next section.

“PLAYING INDIAN,” KILLING INDIANS: SIMULATION AND EXTERMINATION

I can remember being proud the first time I was told that the guerrilla tactics colonial Americans used against the British during the Revolutionary War were learned fighting Indians. Though I cannot recall if I first heard of Indiarmess claimed by early European Americans in junior high or high school, I remember feeling a sense of patriotism mixed with identification with Native people and guilt. Whatever identification I have with American Indians, European Americans, or Europeans of the eighteenth century now seems purely the product of my own imaginary relationship with people of remote historical times. I struggle to imagine what Tom Paine was like, just as I struggle to imagine what Wampanoag chief Metacomet was like, but that childhood pride, identification, and guilt still lingers in my imagined and material relationship with socially constructed categories of nation, race, gender, and history itself. Philip J. Deloria writes in Plaving Indian (1998): Playing Indian, then, reflects one final paradox. The self-defining pairing of American truth with American freedom rests on the ability to wield power against Indians—social, military, economic, and political—while simultaneously drawing power firom them. Indianness may have existed primarily as a cultural artifact in American society, but it has helped create these other forms of power, which have then been turned back on native people. (191) Deloria explores the notion of playing Indian from before the Boston Tea Party through social movements beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. He focuses with a great deal of sophistication on everything from Tea Party “Indians” to Girl Scouts to Deadheads. While Deloria’s interests are not primarily in cinema, his notion of the importance of Indianness to white self-definition, like Clark and Nagel’s aforementioned interest in the formation of white masculinities, is useful for reading images of American Indians in film. Major 130 Dundee exemplifies the notion of playing Indian, as Amos Dundee struggles to understand and, therefore, defeat Sierra Charriba. The “final paradox” in the film, like that described by Deloria, is that Dundee’s appropriation of perceived Indian characteristics enables the defeat of the Indian. This is only an apparent paradox, of course, since the border crossing at the heart of Dundee’s cultural project has precious little to do with a Native point of view; rather, Dundee must learn from the enemy in the way military leaders always have, and the goal is still racist extermination. In its interest in learning from the enemy. Major Dundee again borrows heavily from Fort Apache (1948), particularly the implicit warning about Ford’s Cavalry hero not taking Cochise and Geronimo seriously as adversaries. A running theme in a number of westerns between Fort Apache and Major Dundee involves white people’s attempts to better understand American Indians. The benevolent versions of this theme, from Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow (1950) to John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964), are almost always patronizing race-relations movies that, like their postwar equivalents in the genres of war film and melodrama, are finally Eurocentric affairs with frequently flat characters of color. Unscrupulous Indian agents and “renegade” Indians become frequent scapegoats for racial tensions, often implying that U. S. imperialism supported by military force only existed to save ambushed coaches and ranches in skirmishes caused by uncooperative individuals. In other versions of this trend, e.g., Charles Marquis Warren’s Arrowhead (1953) and Ford’s The Searchers, racist representatives of white power fuse an anthropological knowledge of Indian customs with an imperialistic and frequently bloodthirsty quest to “subdue” Native Americans. In The Searchers, for example, Ethan Edwards shoots out an Indian’s eyes, explaining to the others that he has done so to force the dead man to wander blind in the spirit world. The preceding is only a superficial reading of several complex films, but I think this is as accurate a reading of the collective race politics of the postwar westem as possible in a paragraph. My intent is neither to equate the racism of Ethan Edwards with the overall impact of The Searchers nor to absolve the film; rather, I seek to point out that white people struggling to identify with Native American people can serve multiple functions, not all particularly noble. In Major Dundee, understanding the Apaches or, rather, playing 131 Indian becomes a key to defeating the Apaches. Like Charriba, Dundee is a renegade, and both men are characterized by a certain amount of arrogance. Dundee’s egomaniacal search for the Rostes children is made more egomaniacal by the fact that he has not been ordered to do so. Moreover, when he gets the children back, he continues his quest, indicating that the safety of the children is at best only part of his concern. Charriba’s taunting question to Lt. Brannon, “Who will you send against me now?” indicates his arrogance as well, at least if we trust the narrative of Ryan. Nevertheless, if one reading might grant Charriba enough development to suggest hubris, the warrior is finally more important to the plot as a symbol than he is as a developed character. Therefore, Major Dundee is a typically Eurocentric Indian westem insofar as the Indian perspective is marginalized, but Major Dundee, more than most westerns, is self-consciously preoccupied with the value of playing Indian. Dundee is implicitly freed by Charriba’s renegade massacre in that the massacre occasions the Major’s own renegade search for something better than Fort Benlin. The massacre is represented by burning buildings, and these burning structures provide a mise en scene for Charriba’s liberation of the Rostes boys from the gates of the ranch while also occasioning the exodus of Dundee’s motley bunch from the gates of Fort Benlin to Mexico. But this relationship between Charriba’s raid and Dundee’s liberation from a disciplinary appointment is subtle, only a hint of what is to come. The most significant early moment of playing Indian, or rather failure to play Indian, is Dundee’s defeat by Charriba at a Mexican river. The Cavalry’s defeat by the Apaches is preceded by the return of the Rostes children, who are, significantly, dressed like Indians. Jim Kitses notes the importance of disguise in the film: Peckinpah underlines the moral ambiguity by his use of costumes which function ingeniously as masks through the film. Lean, brown and breech-clouted, the Rostes boys return to hum happily as they demonstrate their skill with bow and arrow. (149) For Kitses this moral ambiguity reveals a “savage direction open to all men—an interior potential” where civilization masks savagery at its core. Kitses also notes that one of the scenes deleted from the film involves children at the Rostes Halloween party before the

132 massacre scurrying about dressed as Indians (140). It is possible and accurate to read this costuming in terms of larger themes of performance in the film. Michael Bliss, for example, notes that “Dundee is a poseur, more a figure of a man than a man” (69). And Bernard F. Dukore (1999), whose analysis of Peckinpah’s films emphasizes their debt to existentialism, reads the performative aspects of Major Dundee in terms of Sartre’s “bad faith” or “a lie to oneself,” concentrating mostly on Tyreen’s attempts to preserve his self- image (18). 1 do not disagree with either of these readings. Dundee is a “poseur” and Tyreen does deceive himself. Moreover, there is much in the film to validate Kitses’s reading of an “interior potential” for savagery. All of this said, however, the Rostes children playing Indian once they have been returned, and during the deleted Halloween sequence, points to both a limited critique of the motivations behind U. S. imperialism and to Dundee’s failure to play Indian himself, a deadly game that will finally support the imperialist effort later in the film. When the old Apache man brings the Rostes children, Gomez translates that the man is tired of fighting but that he fought because “It’s their land, all of it.” Gomez pauses mysteriously after he translates, his translation mixing what is supposed to be the old man’s words with a third-person reference to the Apache. Gomez may use third person to imply his own beliefs or he may use third person to distance himself from the Apache through the act of translation, but his pause is telling. Gomez is a perfect Union soldier, frequently expressing his contempt for the Confederates and never openly critiquing Dundee’s mission or anything Union. Resourceful on either side of the border, Gomez is also a liminal figure, who, according to Peckinpah’s original intentions, “as a boy had been stolen by the Apaches and had ridden with them for two years against his fellow Mexicans” (Kitses 140). Gomez’s pause as the old Apache talks reveals mystery in this otherwise impeccably loyal character, even to the point of implying his empathy with the Apache enemy. Other moments of empathy are built into the scene in limited ways. As the children shoot arrows and eat, one of them comments that it is “better than all that dog meat we been eating,” to which Wiley replies, “Did you ever see a fat Apache?” The line mocks the Apaches’ supposed diet, but also confirms the suffering of the enemy.

133 Dundee is as oblivious to Gomez’s potential empathy as he is to almost every racial tension in his unit. He sends the children to safety with Gomez, which might suggest that the Major wants to free Gomez from the attack that is to come, but this is unlikely, since, if the Major questions Gomez’s loyalties at all, the Mexican Sergeant is the last person he should let out of his sight before a surprise attack. Dundee questions the loyalties of Tyreen and the Southemers, of the Indian scout Riago, and of the old man, but none of these suspicions seems to be informed by anything except his history with Tyreen and his unapologetic racism toward the Apaches. When it comes to understanding cultural border relations or the possibility of mixed sympathies, Dundee lacks all ability to empathize. When Riago, at one point, describes himself as a “camp dog” for his assimilationist behavior, Dundee throws the title back at him again, just as Dundee calls Aesop’s men “your six coloreds” after Aesop uses the term, Dundee’s voice hinting at derision in each case. Even as a bigot, Dundee only repeats what his men say about themselves, but this detachment from real interaction is hardly dispassionate understanding. Dundee simply refuses to understand anybody other than himself. His racism is the closest characteristic he has to understanding other cultures or the possibility of intercultural relations, a weakness that is a leadership flaw given that his entire company is filled with people with mixed cultural sympathies: Tyreen, O. W. Hadley, Aesop, Potts, Riago, Gomez, etcetera. Therefore, Dundee’s sending Gomez away with the children is a potential tactical mistake. His sending away the cross-cultural Sergeant and the children, all of whom have mastered the art of playing Indian, is symbolic as well, ominously foreshadowing the defeat of a man who has failed to play Indian himself. Thinking more about the Southerner’s potential betrayal, Dundee sends two of Tyreen’s best men away with Gomez and the children, concentrating on his own preoccupations with Tyreen more than the Apache Indians he is about to attack. Fittingly, the attack is a total failure. The Apaches wait for the Cavalry and ambush. Tyreen, a more fit leader for border crossing, leads the first twelve men across the river, and Tyreen is the first to note that it is a trap. When some Apaches approach dressed as Union soldiers, Tyreen whistles “Dixie,” and they betray their identity by not responding angrily. Tyreen’s acute understanding of the North/South tension of Dundee’s

134 Cavalry informs his ability to spot the Apaches’ disguises. The attack as a whole, however, is a failed border crossing, a flawed attempt to get across the river, Apache lines, and a border of cultural understanding. Dundee has failed to take his enemy seriously and failed to imagine the battle from the opposite perspective, and he loses men, ammunition, and most of his stores at the bottom of the river. The borders separating him from Charriba remain impenetrable. Balanced against the fiasco at the river are two later contests that involve playing Indian: (1) the Cavalry’s attack on the sleeping French after Hadley and Aesop have watched them enter a canyon; (2) the Cavalry’s attack and defeat of Charriba in another canyon. The first of these contests is actually training for the second. After Dundee’s men liberate the Mexican village, they deliberately allow the French to escape so that they do not have to deal with the prisoners. Later, the French give chase but are tricked into passing the bulk of Dundee’s men as Aesop and Hadley watch and laugh at their frivolous European incompetence. It is at this moment that Aesop brags that his men could take the African French troops with one hand behind their backs, a boast I have shown to reveal Aesop’s assimilation by segregating his duties along racial lines and symbolically connecting him to the one-armed Potts. Dundee’s men attack the sleeping French with the Indians Potts and Riago leading the raid. Significantly, the attack begins with Potts strangling a black picket, one of the African French in charge of night watch. This sneak attack not only locates the success of the raid with Potts’s Indianness but also punctuates the assimilationist connection between Potts, Aesop, and the African French soldiers. Second in the night attack is the Apache scout Riago who shoots into French tents, followed by a cry from Reverend Dahlstrom: “Mighty is the arm of the Lord.” This combination of characterization and battle, a tightly edited fusion of exposition and action that will become Peckinpah’s trademark, reaffirms the assimilationism of Riago, the “praying Indian,” by aligning his position in the sneak attack with the bloodthirsty Christianity of Dahlstrom. Therefore, the night attack on the French lancers models the importance of Indianness to successful strategy by privileging the prowess of Potts and

135 Riago, but the attack is also marked by constant nods to the assimilationism at the heart of Potts, Riago, and, by association with the previous scene, the African French and African American soldiers. Going native, i.e., Southem, becomes the feature distinguishing Aesop’s men from the assimilationist African French troops, but beneath Aesop’s border crossing is a critique of the supposed difference between African American and African French soldiers. However, this critique is masked by the renegade associations of Southemness, which, like Indianness, is a positive value in battle. Moreover, going Native, i.e., Indian, is at the core of the attack’s success, even though this border crossing is accompanied by Pott’s and Riago’s loss of a Native identity. Indianness is explored and performed by Dundee’s Cavalry, a model of heroic success, but the Indian is simultaneously subject to Christian and European hegemony; e.g., Dahlstrom defines the attack as a Christian undertaking and the whole affair is accompanied by the assimilationism of characters of color. Finally, Dundee defeats the Apaches by using the strategy the Apaches used to defeat him. Ryan’s voice-over comments: “We ran from the Apaches and the French, then circled and headed for the river and home. The men were angry, wanting to continue our pursuit, and then suddenly we knew we weren’t running away from anything. We were mnning toward the end of our search.’’ In these lines there is a reflexive attention to the end of the movie, looming like the Rio Grande in the distance, just two battles away. Moreover, the words “our search” validate Jim Kitses’s claim that the Cavalry’s struggle, like Marlow’s in the famous imperialist/impressionist novel Heart of Darkness (19021 is partly internal. But the internal “savage” motif in Peckinpah’s movie is about more than an imperialist ideology of the evolution away from and return to savagery. While this European racist mainstay operates in the film, it is also important that the men’s running mirrors the Apache’s strategy at the river. Pott’s tells Dundee, “This is as good a place as any to do what you have in mind,” again noting the internal nature of Dundee’s struggle but articulating this struggle along lines of strategy, here a strategy Dundee borrows from Charriba. Dundee’s men enter a canyon, and Dundee orders that the pickets, represented by the culturally liminal characters Gomez and Potts, allow the Apache to enter the Cavalry’s lines. When the Apache enter the lines, they are ambushed by Dundee’s men

136 and a fight ensues in which the Apache are vanquished and Charriba killed by Bugler Ryan. The idea of drawing the Apache into the ambush is an appropriation of Charriba’s earlier strategy and as such indicates that Dundee has learned something about playing Indian. Moreover, Charriba’s band itself is swallowed within the Cavalry’s ranks, entering through the gatekeepers Potts and Gomez, who both are forced to skirmish at the picket lines and are nearly killed by Dundee’s plan. The absorption of Charriba’s strategy, i.e., playing Indian, allows for the absorption of Charriba’s Apache warriors, and the film’s most violent scene of assimilation follows as the Apache Indians are destroyed by Dundee’s supposed Indiarmess. Just as Dundee relies on the Southem outlaw Tyreen, eventually assimilating his old friend and Aesop as flag bearers destroyed by the Major’s quest for glory, Dundee relies on a notion of Indianness to destroy the Indians. This is not a new pattern in American film, for the supposedly Indian-like Indian killer is at the heart of racist fantasies in films like Rio Grande. Arrowhead, and The Searchers. However, the attention to the assimilationist aspects of these appropriations of outlaw and renegade Otherness speaks to a cynicism in Peckinpah’s vision, bom in the absurdity of Maior Dundee’s attempts to reconcile contentious cross-cultural relationships with a common mission, a mission that is itself motivated by the selfishness of Amos Dundee. Doug McKinney and Richard Slotkin note that Ford’s Rio Grande 09501 reconciles North and South as the Cavalry chases Apaches into Mexico (McKinney 63, Slotkin 562-567). Maior Dundee borrows this project, but adds layer upon convoluted layer of national, racial, regional, international, interracial, and interregional identities into a filmic model of cultural border crossing that is at once oriented toward appropriations of outlaw and renegade Otherness and aimed at assimilating models of Otherness and border crossing into Dundee’s egomaniacal mission. The goals of Dundee’s personal mission have obvious social consequences: (1) the assimilation of African Americans (i.e., Aesop and his men), Mexican Americans (i.e., Gomez), Native Americans (i.e., Gomez, Potts, and Riago), and Southemers (i.e., Tyreen and his men); (2) the destmction of renegade Indians (i.e., Charriba) and Southemers (i.e., Tyreen and Hadley). These are social goals accomplished through Dundee’s personal obsessions. However, along the way Dundee’s social accomplishments are 137 constantly marked by fraudulence. This is especially true of Dundee’s liberation of Juarista Mexicans from the French, and Mexico is the third of the cultural borders we must explore.

I VIVA DUNDEE!: “REVOLUTIONARY” HEROISM AT MEXICO’S EXPENSE

I have already discussed the associations of Mexico with Europe, as Tyreen crosses the Rio Grande proclaiming, “To Mexico you bloody idioL” But Tyreen’s ties to Mexico through the Mexican American War are contradictory. The movie does very little to reconcile Tyreen’s oppositional past relationship with Mexico, concentrating instead on Tyreen’s ability to speak Spanish and, therefore, his ability to cross cultural borders more fluidly than Major Dundee. If anything is reconciled for Tyreen in Mexico, it is his European past with his Southem present. Tyreen’s suicidal attack on French lancers at the end of the movie, an act of crazy bravery observed by his proud Southem men, qualifies his earlier use of European identity to separate himself from the “ignorant” South. Tyreen conveniently serves as a model hero for Dundee’s mission by disowning a stereotype of Southemness while still heroically realigning himself with his Southem men and the Mexican underdog. This is a neat ideological trick of Major Dundee, which stmggles to maintain the nobility of the Southem gentlemen outlaw amidst a disavowal of the racism at the heart of this image. This disavowal is achieved through Tyreen’s deference early in the plot to classism and Eurocentric sources of Southem nobility, but finally, because Europe, in the form of the French, represents spoiled tyranny, Tyreen the potential tyrant must fight against the French. Tyreen is, therefore, Southem but not racist, European but not privileged, an outlaw both noble and answering to the downtrodden. All of this cultural shape-shifting is a testament to Tyreen’s adaptability, which Dundee lacks at least until he defeats the Apaches, but the culture hopping of Tyreen is also wrought with the irony that he is destroyed assimilating to Dundee’s cause.

138 Nowhere is Dundee’s jealously of Tyreen’s ability to cross borders more prevalent than in the men’s struggle for the love of Teresa Santiago (Senta Berger). Teresa herself is a model of successful border crossing; like Tyreen she reconciles her European ancestry with her devotion to underdogs: the Juarista villagers. Bom German, Teresa’s Spanish name “Santiago” apparently comes from her husband, a doctor murdered for his sympathies with Juarez’s attempts to rid 1860s Mexico of French control. The Spanish first name ‘Teresa” and her Spanish accent is never adequately explained by the film, indicating that her supposed German origins might simply be a ridiculous attempt by filmmakers to avoid an interracial coupling between Teresa and Dundee. However, this explanation is dubious, at least where Peckinpah’s interests are concemed; Peckinpah married Mexican actress Begonia Palacios, who played a bit part in the film, after falling for her on the set. Moreover, given the film’s interest in border crossing and characters of mixed cultural alliances, it is hard to imagine this singular attempt at segregation in an otherwise multicultural mess, though Hollywood’s racism has produced stranger decisions based on segregationist paranoia. Berger herself was bom in Vienna and cut her teeth in German-language films, but this need not necessitate any mention of German origins for her character since Caucasians routinely play people from all sorts of ethic and racial backgrounds in Hollywood cinema (Katz 116). Most plausibly, Teresa is created German to identify her with Tyreen and with sympathetic European intervention in Mexico, balanced against the tyranny of the French. In fact, sympathetic intervention in Mexico is an important theme of Major Dundee and Peckinpah’s other Mexico westerns. Dundee arrives to rob the French garrison and finds the French are locked behind closed doors, a starving dog greeting the Cavalry as they enter the village. Teresa tells Dundee that there are neither food supplies nor women in the village, assuming that Dundee enters without “flying the colors” because he intends to rape and pillage. She is correct in assuming that Dundee intends to steal food—he hides the colors to avoid an intemational incident—and she is at least symbolically correct that he seeks women, since Dundee’s relationship with Mexico will consistently be mediated through Teresa. As if to prove his intentions are truer than they actually are and alleviate his guilt, Dundee abruptly orders his men to fire at the French, even before Teresa finishes

139 describing the suffering of the village. The Major struggles to dissociate himself from the French, especially after Teresa equates the Cavalry with common thieves hiding behind phony causes: “We’ve been attacked by Apaches, by local bandits, by freebooters from Texas, and liberated by the French, and now United States Cavalry.” She uses the term “liberated” with clear sarcasm, equating the U. S. Army with the French oppressors, and pointing out the euphemisms used by European and European-American powers to justify imperialism. Unable to charm Teresa with Spanish, as Tyreen does when he first meets her, Dundee aims his efforts at liberating the villagers, and following the distribution of French stores to the hungry women and children still alive, Dundee poses on a crumbling wall with graffiti reading, “Viva Dundee.” The liberator tells Ben, “you look like quite the gentleman.” Ben replies, “After the war, Amos, the Tyreens of County Claire become the landed gentry of Virginia.” While Amos is partly joking, needling his old friend, Ben does become a “gentleman” by helping to liberate the village, and both men are regenerated by a cause less selfish and corrupt than their search for Charriba. Ben still fantasizes about being “landed gentry,” Eurocentrism undermining his intentions regarding the peons of the village, and Ben questions Dundee’s motives when he says, “You haven’t got the temperament to be a liberator, Amos.” “I don’t?” Dundee replies. Major Dundee creates a situation in which Ben and Amos can both be redeemed by fighting for the revolutionary cause, but both men are still motivated by selfishness. Upset that Teresa enjoys Tyreen’s gentlemanly demeanor, Dundee says, “He is corrupt, but I will save him.” Constantly pointing to the “charade” of Tyreen’s behavior, reducing Tyreen’s nobility to a “style” in the eyes of Teresa in order to win her love, Dundee is himself a false liberator as well. He sits upon a crumbling wall, labeled with a political slogan proclaiming his revolutionary heroism, and, later, he looks from the crumbling arches of the village entrance across a river into the distance, imagining that he has finally crossed a border. But he lacks the patience to be a sincere revolutionary. He soon looks at his watch, worried that the fiesta following the liberation has run too long and that Charriba continues to allude him, and he orders that the French be allowed to escape.

140 The Mexican village becomes, for Dundee, an idyllic fantasy and a feminized space that, like the home of Circe, keeps him from his mission. But the village also offers Dundee the chance to be a real hero for the sociopolitically oppressed, an offer he eventually refuses but initially exploits to build his heroic image. After the French escape, Dundee’s Cavalry practices its ambush skills on the lancers, but his refusal to follow through with his commitment to the villagers and Teresa allows the French to again raid the village, this time murdering everyone but Teresa and a couple of children who end up later in the Cavalry’s care. Describing the massacre, Potts says, “Them boys in the pretty hats make the Apaches look like missionaries.” Tyreen adds, “Never underestimate the value of a European education.” Potts’s sympathies for the Apaches turn the Europeans into the film’s most grotesque monsters, but it does not appear that Potts or anyone else gets the irony of equating missionaries with goodness in a Cavalry where the holy man is the murderous Reverend Dahlstrom. Furthermore, Tyreen’s joke reaffirms Potts’s claim that the Apache massacre pales in comparison to white European’s penchant for torture, but Tyreen’s joke also serves as a possible commentary on his own claims to European nobility, claims made by an Irishman no less, certainly aware of the evils of empire. Increasingly, Teresa becomes devoted to Dundee despite the fraudulence of his revolutionary heroism, but her devotion rings as falsely as his revolutionary commitment. This may be flawed character development, perhaps unsurprising given Peckinpah’s lousy track record with female characters and given the inordinate number of characters in the film, or this may be an indication that she, like Tyreen and Dundee, is playing at caring. I think the falsity of her devotion is a little of both. Potts and Tyreen return Teresa to the Cavalry only minutes before the execution of O. W. Hadley. When Tyreen shoots Hadley, Teresa covers the eyes of a Mexican child and turns her head, unwilling to let the child or herself see the violence of their liberators. Even though Tyreen does the shooting the overwhelming tone of the scene is that Dundee has made a mistake by executing Hadley, dividing a command that was finally beginning to come together. Hadley claims that he ran off because he was “hankering for a woman” back at the Mexican village, and

141 this too foreshadows Dundee’s failure as a leader as the film cuts to Teresa’s face, hinting at Dundee’s hypocrisy to come when he will withdraw with Teresa outside the pickets, deserting his men and eventually drawing fire from Apaches. Outside the pickets, Dundee and Teresa swim together and embrace in a scene that by comparison to the film’s stark desert and canyon imagery, is softly composed, lush with greenery, Edenic. Dundee is purified by the water and Teresa’s love, absolved for the death of Hadley, but the moment at the river is illusory. Teresa confides, “I’ve seen too much dying. I wanted so desperately to feel alive. For both of us to feel alive.” Then, after he asks if she has thought of living in the United States and she says she has not, an Apache arrow strikes deeply into his leg. Suddenly, they are attacked, but the Southern troops are there to rescue them, and Tyreen points out that Dundee is a hypocrite, deserting his lines for a woman “of rather doubtful virtue.” Tyreen speaks as one wounded by unrequited love, but his reference to Dundee’s hypocrisy and Teresa’s questionable virtue points to the illusoriness of their moment at the river. It is fitting that the river is where they both struggle to feel alive because this scene is also a failed border crossing for Dundee. The Major tries to bring Teresa, like everything else on his journey, back to America, only to be reminded of division by an Apache arrow. Forced to recover in Durango, Dundee slips into a drunken dream. Like a dream the Durango sequence seems to operate outside of conscious time, as Teresa enters a room to find a bearded, long-dmnk Dundee with a prostitute. The prostitute asks in Spanish if Dundee is Teresa’s man (“^Era tu hombre?”). Teresa replies, “No.” The moment is brief but devastating, punctuating the illusoriness of their bond but also affirming Dundee’s real relationship with Mexico, Peckinpah’s idyllic fantasy but also his perpetual whore. Later, Tyreen the border crosser leads a rescue of Dundee from his drunkenness and French spies. Looking at Dundee, a bearded, failed Moses in a poncho, Tyreen comments, “You make an unlikely looking Mexican.” This, of course, is the story of Dundee’s failed border crossings all a l o n g . 2 2

Charlton Heston played a Mexican policeman in Orson Welles’s noir classic Touch of Evil (1958), a movie that also explores Heston’s Moses image. In Touch of Evil Heston makes an “unlikely looking Mexican, ” a fact that Welles foregrounds with some success. 142 Major Dundee’s journey is one of border crossings not only into Mexico but into images of Southern outlawry, renegade Indianness, and Mexican revolutionary heroism. These border crossings are personal, even solipsistic. But Dundee’s is a solipsism with political consequences: temporary liberation of Mexican Juaristas and forced assimilation of several cultural groups. Major Dundee explores the tensions between Dundee’s selfish quest for heroic regeneration and its consequences, as the hero exploits and/or simulates what amount to heroic stereotypes: the Southern outlaw, the renegade Indian, the Mexican revolutionary. But if Peckinpah’s film is driven by these stereotypes, the film also consistently makes an issue of the disparity between Dundee’s supposed heroism and the path of destmction it leaves. Some of the trickiest business of reading, especially reading through the lens of cultural studies where the stakes can be very high, involves negotiating the difference between what ideologies a text advocates and what ideologies a text reveals. Major Dundee is a particularly difficult film for the critic in this respect because it seems often to advocate and reveal at the same time. Major Dundee is a phallocentric and Eurocentric film insofar as its central obsession is Dundee’s search for heroism, but the film repeatedly undermines the certainty of Dundee’s goals, let alone the success of his search, by suggesting that these goals mask assimilation and destruction for the very models of heroism Dundee summons to his aid. Nowhere is the undermining of Dundee’s heroic goals clearer than in his indifference to the Juaristas. Both Dundee’s domestic bliss with Teresa and the liberation are illusory, and Dundee’s search for heroism pollutes Mexico, his relationship with Teresa, and almost everyone he touches. At the river, Teresa says, “Oh, it’s lovely here.” Dundee replies, “I don’t spoil it?” She says not, but he actually spoils everything. It is fitting that in the film’s last battle, at the Rio Grande, Tyreen and Aesop die protecting the colors, just as the villagers die playing extras for Dundee’s revolutionary pose, because Dundee’s search for heroic validation almost always destroys the very heroic underdogs from whom he might learn. Dundee exploits and simulates what he needs to beat the Apaches, but Dundee is not really much of a hero. In fact, the Cavalry’s border crossing back into Texas is really a thinly veiled retreat The French, not allowed to follow into the United States, obey the border, and Dundee exploits the border, just as he exploits border 143 crossing, to insulate himself from a series of accomplishments in Mexico that are really pretty unflattering. Aside from the rescue of the Rostes children, who seem to have been just fine playing Indian with the Apaches, Dundee’s mission accomplishes next to nothing besides destruction. But the challenge of reading Major Dundee, as I note in the introduction to my reading of the film, is also complicated by the film’s contentious authorship, particularly by Peckinpah’s struggles with Jerry Bresler and Columbia. Peckinpah spent much of the production playing renegade director by flaunting his ability to shoot over budget, and with these details in mind, it is nearly impossible to know the circus that was the production of the film without seeing that circus partly reflected in the film’s plot about an egomaniacal leader running amok in another country. David Weddle recounts the odd feeling the cast and crew had of being immersed in Peckinpah’s own egomaniacal mission: The rivers, the Tehuixtla and Rio Balsas, were cooler, but so polluted with sewage the actors and stuntmen had to have their ears and noses flushed out by nurses after taking falls in the water. And there were the bugs: thousands of welt- inflicting gnats and mosquitoes as big as vampire bats. Only the Yaqui Indian extras and Peckinpah seemed oblivious to the bloodsuckers. Little by little, the movie and reality were becoming eerily intertwined. The company was no longer playing the parts of cavalry soldiers; it was those soldiers. And just like the characters in the film, one by one the crew began to crack under the strain of this journey without end. (241-242) Biographers love this stuff: Huston and Hepburn big-game hunting during the production of The African Queen (1951), Werner Herzog consumed by the Peruvian jungle while shooting his tale of obsession Fitzcarraldo (1982), Francis Coppola’s own personal and financial heart of darkness during the making of Apocalvpse Now (19781.^3 Lost in the loop of art and life, the critic and film historian are periiaps always in danger of attributing false causation to textual features. Weddle, for example, helps Peckinpah play Indian, by

Huston’s Africa, Herzog’s Peru, and Coppola’s Philippines are chronicled, respectively, in the fiction film White Hunter Black Heart (1990). the documentary Burden of Dreams (1983), and the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse f 19911. These films and numerous written accounts attest to the continuing critical and popular fascination with life mirroring art on the set. That each of these films, and the films about them, explore imperialism is not particularly shocking, since filmmaking in another country is a form of imperialism itself, an exploitation of the land and people, harvested as an image and used for profit. 144 equating the director’s endurance with that of the Yaqui Indians. But is this really a flaw of Weddle’s account or a reflection of Peckinpah’s own attraction/repulsion to border crossing, wallowing in those rivers hour after hour to film the perfect image of a defeated Major? In order to approach textual answers to the questions surrounding the film’s backstory, the relationship between Peckinpah’s and Dundee’s obsessions, and the politics of border crossing in the film, we must finally engage directly with the first borders crossed in Maior Dundee, formal metaborders central to the tone of the film: point of view and narration.

WHO MADE MAJOR DUNDEE?: POINT OF VIEW, NARRATION, AND THE BORDERS OF CREATION

The first borders crossed in Major Dundee, borders important to understanding the politics of the film’s vision, are the interrelated borders of point of view and narration. The film opens with a shot of Ryan’s 1864-1865 Journal, the “Foreword” page of which is narrated by a voice other than Ryan’s. The voice claims that Ryan, described in third person, is the “sole survivor” of the Rostes massacre and his journal “the only existing record of this tragedy and the campaign that followed.” Surprisingly, Michael Bliss (1993) is one of the only critics to give the first-person narration that follows the “Foreword” much attention, writing that “we need to determine how reliable a chronicler Ryan is, since his reliability will determine how much validity we assign to the events that he relates” (58). One reason that critics have given insufficient attention to this device may be a result of auteur theory run amok, since David Weddle suggests that the narrative device was an afterthought inserted by the butcher Bresler rather than by Peckinpah, after the producer’s cut failed to make sense: Even Bresler recognized that he’d ripped holes the size of sound stages in the narrative, and he tried to plug them up by adding a narration track. Reverting to Harry Julian Fink’s initial concept that the story would unfold as a series of diary entries, trooper Ryan became the audience’s guide through the twisted wreckage of Dundee. The device was pitifully inadequate. (252) 145 For Bliss the narration is important to understanding the tone of the film, while Weddle characterizes it as an failed cosmetic afterthought, their varying approaches reviving a critical controversy about film authorship, interpretation, intention, and accident. But the inadequacy of the narration need not be a case of either/or, i.e., either intentional or accidental. Even if a narrator was included for continuity, unreliable narration is a common enough device to suggest that what started as a band-aid easily became a source of irony at the heart of the film’s themes of redemption and heroism. There is, for instance, a great deal of potential self-consciousness about narration and subjectivity in the collusion of Ryan’s journal with the titles at the film’s opening. Peckinpah’s title sequences, like the title sequences and cameos of Hitchcock, are almost always calculated to comment on themes in his f i l m s . 2 4 Whether the product of Bresler or Peckinpah, the titles in Major Dundee are among the most telling in the director’s body of work, and they operate in conjunction with the presentation of Ryan’s journal. As the “Foreword” is narrated, the page bursts into flames from the center out, revealing the carnage of the Rostes ranch. This is both a cheesy device reminiscent of the burning map in the credits of Bonanza and a more subtle employment of the iris shot commonly tied to point of view in the silent cinema and in self-consciously historical and reflexive movements like the French New Wave. The outward-burning flames create an iris-out, ostensibly tying the image of the massacre to Ryan’s point of view through a didactic spectatorial trick, as if burning away the unidentified editor’s “Foreword” to reveal Ryan’s story. But the use of fire for the iris shot is ambiguous insofar as the actual fire of the incident either grows from Ryan’s account or, more ironically, interrupts his account. The latter possibility, that of interruption, is plausible when we consider that, at the point that the “Foreword” bursts into flames, revealing the massacre, the frame is already beginning what appears to be a dissolve to another frame of horsemen riding. This dissolve, then, is quite literally interrapted by the iris flame, actually putting two filmic devices for connecting print and non-print image in competition. One way to read this is to equate the dissolve with the source of the “Foreword” and the flaming iris with Ryan,

Richard Gentnen and Diane Birdsall note this self-reflexive use of titles in their discussion of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (35). 146 therefore allowing Ryan’s narration to burst through the outer narrative frame of the “Foreword” writer. This reading, however, is doubtful, since Ryan’s voice-over does not actually start until after the introduction not only of Dundee’s visual point of view but also Sierra Charriba’s. Therefore, it is possible that the dissolve in Ryan’s point of view is interrupted by the flames of the massacre, which, if tied to anyone’s point of view at all, arc tied to Charriba, who almost immediately stares down and taunts the tortured Lt. Brannon. The potential irony of this flaming iris, suggesting alternatives to Ryan’s narration, becomes clearer when accompanied by other characteristics of the scene. First, as noted above, among the burning embers of the Rostes ranch Charriba approaches the dying Lt. Brannon and shouts with no small dose of histrionics, “Pony soldier, I am Sierra Charriba! Who will you send against me now?” Charriba’s use of “pony soldier” instead of “horse soldier” belittles the Cavalry and Brannon, but the statement also anticipates the caption “Major Dundee,” which suddenly flashes upon the screen in response to Charriba’s question. Charriba’s use of English, when elsewhere in the film, save a few key scenes, non-English speakers speak in non-English tongues, is realistic insofar as he is speaking to Brannon. But the line is forced, almost ridiculous, again raising questions of intention. Is the line the product of Michael Pate’s acting ability? Is this the genre’s consistent refusal to let its long history of “renegade” Indians be little more than a racist stereotype? Or is this nonsense the product of Ryan’s fantasy? All three are plausible readings, but it is noteworthy that nothing in the scene attempts to tie this grand proclamation to Ryan’s point of view during the aftermath of the massacre. Is Ryan retelling something he actually saw or just something that sounds exciting? Or is Charriba the narrative source of this scene, interrupting Ryan’s narration even before it begins? We will never really know, partly because of the clumsiness and inconsistency of the narration throughout the movie. However, there does seem to be a degree of self-consciousness about the limitations of Ryan’s vision, since following Dundee’s appearance at the massacre a telephoto shot from the top of a hill reveals Charriba watching the Cavalry who are ostensibly unaware of his presence as they approach the carnage. Moreover, this shot of Charriba is repeated as Dundee, Ryan, and

147 Dundee’s relief group leave the camp where Ryan’s voice-over is first employed, suggesting that Charriba’s point of view may even ftame Ryan’s in an ironic twist of perspective. This point-of-view shot is a double interruption into Ryan’s dominant narrative and spectatorial power. First, Charriba’s point of view as Ryan and Dundee approach the camp is abrupt and unexpected, accompanied by a dissonant sound effect that interrupts the ridiculous “Major Dundee March’’ that Mitch Mitchell’s Sing Along Gang performs throughout the credits.^ Secondly, even if we read this shot as Ryan’s racist image of the silent menace of Charriba-always, Ryan fears, watching the Cavalry—this point-of-view shot interrupts Ryan’s narrative by abruptly articulating the absence of Charriba’s true perspective from the narrative. My reading of this convoluted play of point of view is as follows: (1) the outermost narrative layer is what I will provisionally call “Major Dundee”:

(2) the image of the ‘Toreword’’ page reveals that between Ryan and Major Dundee some other narrator, perhaps editor, mediates information; (3) Ryan’s narration, i.e., the pages behind the “Foreword,” begin to bleed through the “Foreword,” a narrative action visually represented by a dissolve to either Charriba’s riders, Brannon’s Cavalry, or Dundee’s Cav^ry, all three of which are supposedly contained by Ryan’s “sole” account of events; (4) the flaming iris interrupts the dissolve, temporarily subverting Ryan’s narrative point of view to show Charriba’s visual point of view and proclamation to the dying Brannon (If the dominant point of view here is in fact Charriba’s, his hyperbolic bragging may indicate his hubris. If this is Ryan’s fantasy of Charriba, then we are faced with the prospect of the space between Ryan’s ideology and the film’s); (5) the words “Major Dundee” violently appear to answer Charriba’s question, and Mitch Mitchell’s Sing Along Gang begins the “Major Dundee March,” suggesting that at the Major Dundee layer there is an ideological identification with the hero Dundee; (6) an image of Charriba looking down at Dundee’s relief patrol resituates looking with Charriba as the “Major Dundee March” stops, but this too is easily an identification with Dundee and/or Ryan at the outer narrative layer, since this is a typical intrusion in the western genre, a genre that is inarguably racist in nearly every one of its treatments of American Indians. One central question of point of view in Major Dundee then becomes whether the limits of 25 It is important to note, however, that sound frequently interrupts alongside the hilltop presence of Indians in westerns; often, as made famous in John Ford westerns, the sound is a stereotypical drum cadence tied to the appearance of Indians in all their ts pical Hollywood accouterments. 148 Ryan’s point of view are an accident of flawed production or a self-conscious source of irony. Complicating this first question even further, however, is the limited Native point of view. Is this limitation a further source of irony or just the product of Hollywood racism? In order to answer this last question it is worth considering that Major Dundee was released after fifteen years of Hollywood westerns that made half-hearted attempts to revise their treatment of Native Americans. On one hand, the hyperbolic nature of Charriba’s bragging must have seemed pretty ridiculous to western fans at the time, well aware of the “noble,” albeit still stereotypical, treatment of chiefs like Cochise and Geronimo in films of the 1950s and early 1960s, even in John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948). On the other hand, it is hard to be positive that this hyperbolic acting is intended on the part of the filimnakers to be the product of Ryan’s vision. Rather, as I have already noted, this seems to be presented as an intrusion of Charriba’s point of view into Ryan’s supposedly authoritative narrative space. Assuming that this line is a bit over the top and not the product of my own misreading or bad acting, it is still hard to determine if hyperbole here is meant to be noticed as hyperbole or just more of an unselfconscious stereotype, since this fifteen-year period of the western produced, in addition to well-meaning but limited revisionism, some of the most racist westerns of all time, e.g.. Arrowhead. These are old and enduring questions for cultural studies and postcolonial criticism—e.g., is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) a study of the relationship between European impressionism and imperialism or is it simply the impressionistic product of imperialism?—and these are questions central to Major Dundee. The one thing of which I am sure is that Maior Dundee as a movie is the flawed result of competing visions and that Major Dundee is, to some degree, self-consciously about competing visions. Therefore, the failures and the thematic goals of the film leave it both rich with potential self-reflection but also a testament to the dangers of analysis. The “Foreword” describes Ryan as the “sole survivor” of the massacre, even though only moments later Ryan tells us that the Cavalry scout Riago also survived. Ryan is suspicious that Riago has betrayed the Cavalry but obviously feels no need to account for the mysterious circumstances of his own survival. Therefore, Ryan’s account is 149 suspicious at best But, as I have tried to ask, what constitutes Ryan’s account? Charriba’s? The account of the “Foreword”? The film as a whole? In order to answer the last of these questions it is necessary to admit the ambiguous circumstances of the film’s production and the ambivalence at the heart of its sociopolitics while still recognizing the importance of questions about what Major Dundee finally does with the politics of race, region, nation, and gender. 1 read these questions of point of view at the beginning of Major Dundee as a self­ reflexive device foregrounding competing visions. This self-reflexivity is bom partly in accidents of production brought about by the actual competing visions behind the film, but it is also exploited by the filmmakers to allow the narrative use of point of view to function as a commentary on the competing interests so haphazardly handled by Dundee himself. During the title sequence, the first close shot of a burning building is superimposed by the names “Mario Adorf,” “Brock Peters,” and “Warren Oates,” the actors playing Gomez, Aesop, and O. W. Hadley. Since so much architectural destruction in the film is associated with illusory border crossing, it is fitting that the Mexican American, African American, and Southern American characters are together superimposed on the burning house, which offers up an image of cross-cultural assimilation mixed with an image of destruction, walls coming down but excited by and exciting the flames of cross-cultural conflict. Over all of this imagery of destruction is the “Major Dundee March,” performed by Mitch Mitchell’s Sing Along Gang and added, according to Paul Seydor, by the studio (73). The song is an absurdly optimistic soundtrack for the carnage of the massacre and one of the film’s (probably) accidental and unnecessary sources of greatest irony:

150 Though your heart be with the North, or your heart be with the South, the coat of blue or gray, it’s no nevermind. Won’t be long ‘til we’ll be home raining kisses on the mouth of the girl we left behind.

*****

Fall in behind the Major, and we’ll all get home again. The last refrain of the chorus, promising that the Major will return everyone safely home, is accompanied by a burning house superimposed with: “Produced by Jerry Bresler.” Suddenly, “Directed by Sam Peckinpah” intrudes into the titles as the burning house collapses! Whose joke is this? The contest of visions behind the film is at the heart of the film’s reflexivity, but also at the heart of the film’s treatment of point of view and Dundee’s heroism. Almost none of the men “get home again” alive, though many are assimilated into the big hegemonic reservation known as America. However, America for Dundee means nothing compared to his personal quest for heroic validation, so the fantasy of reconciliation in the song, articulated in terms of North and South to the exclusion of the multiple cultural and cross-cultural categories explored in the film, is ultimately subsumed in an egomaniacal quest for heroism. Dundee’s solipsistic heroism, assimilating as it borrows for personal gain, is a source of hegemonic unification, but Major Dundee is so deeply cynical compared with, say. Fort Apache that it is hard to believe that anything has been resolved. Ultimately, to align point of view in the title sequence solely with Charriba, Ryan, or some reductive notion of the larger ideological project of the film misses part of the point, which is that these points of view are in competition. In the opening sequence, Charriba is the point of view that escapes Ryan, just as Dundee fails so often to penetrate cultural borders in the film, but Charriba’s point of view is also Ryan’s and Hollywood’s imagined Indian menace. When Aesop and Hadley observe the French from a hill, temporarily reconciling their differences through Aesop’s assimilation to a Southern identity, their border crossing seizes the balcony point of view “owned” by Charriba early in the film. This seizure of visual power prefaces the Cavalry’s Indian-style attack on the 151 French, since playing Indian is itself a cultural seizure of point of view. And the appropriation of Charriba’s point of view by Aesop and Hadley is part of a hegemonic spiral wherein the South appropriates Aesop’s point of view, the Cavalry’s mission appropriates Charriba’s, and Dundee assimilates all points of view with the help of his chronicler and heroic initiate Ryan. Therefore, the larger national project of assimilation is mediated through the central egomaniacs of Major Dundee: narrator Ryan, Amos Dundee, and Sam Peckinpah. Michael Bliss notes how “improbably” Ryan kills Charriba in the last battle between the Cavalry and the Indians, stating that this killing “seems to settle the score against Charriba rather too neatly, suggesting that Ryan the storyteller has altered the facts and cast himself in the role of successful avenger simply because it pleased him to do so” (59). Ryan kills Charriba as the Apache warrior looks down at the battle from the top of the canyon, recalling the hill from which Charriba watches the Cavalry at the ranch earlier and, therefore, seizing the point of view or imagined point of view Charriba has used to challenge Ryan’s narrative authority and Dundee’s heroism all along. As Dundee kicks the dead Charriba into the canyon, Ryan says, “He looks so small now,” referencing the smallness of even the most formidable adversaries in death, but doubly drawing attention to point of view: (1) Charriba looks small because his corpse is below Dundee and Ryan in the mise en scene; (2) Charriba “looks” small because his point of view or imagined point of view has been thoroughly appropriated. Ryan’s narration, and his narrative point of view, like Dundee’s heroism, is the product of coercion. And Ryan’s narrative function is directly tied to Dundee’s search for heroic validation in the film’s last frames, when, apparently retreating from the French, Dundee asks for the militaristic euphemism of Ryan’s patriotic bugle: “Play us a tune, son.” Southern Sgt. Chillum bears one flag and an African American trooper bears another, but Ryan and Dundee conspire to bear heroic and narrative control of the mission, as Mitch Mitchell again sings: “Fall in behind the Major, / and we’ll all get home again.” Peckinpah biography tells us that there was an interest in exposing the roots of mythic western heroism in Fink’s script, an interest Oscar Saul and Peckinpah picked up on in the rewrites. Saul notes:

152 There were a lot of things in the script which we later took about how much easier it is for men to go to war, rather than to take on real responsibility, like building a home and raising a family. What Sam was trying to show in Dundee, and what he did show so successfully in The Wild Bunch, was the death wish behind this whole Western myth. Because these guys were just as ready to die as they were to have a beer. (Weddle 233) Peckinpah’s confirmation to actor R. G. Armstrong’s suspicion that Major Dundee was intended to be “Mobv-Dick on horseback,” while easy to take too literally as a subtext, also points to the nature of personal obsession at the heart of Peckinpah’s tale of Western heroism, a heroism formed around the evasion of responsibilities. But the domestic in Major Dundee, aside ftom “the girl you left behind” in the “Major Dundee March,” is in Mexico, and here Dundee definitely destroys buildings and avoids responsibilities. Therefore, if there are loose connections between Peckinpah’s evasion of life in the U. S. and Dundee’s, it is important to note that Dundee evades responsibility in Mexico as well. In conclusion. Major Dundee is Peckinpah’s film, a reflection of male heroic fantasies and failures. Peckinpah wallows in both fantasies and failures but seems keenly aware that the available generic models are largely corrupt and inadequate next to the wake of destruction necessary for hero-building. But Major Dundee also belongs to an argument, not just about length, but about tone and continuity, and about a generic attempt at border crossing finally too ambitious for the visions of its creators. Major Dundee is neither a successful narrative film nor a radical sociopolitical film. Rather, it is the sort of mess that can only occur when idealistic notions of heroism at the heart of the western strain to accommodate and reconcile cultural divisions and interactions so explicitly complex they resist containment at all. The movie is self-reflexive formally, full of ironies at the level of plot and character, and a self-referential nod to its production and its director, but the movie defies definitions of revisionism that suggest a repair of old generic problems and related sociopolitical problems. In fact. Major Dundee is partly in a state of ill repair because it is bom in the collision of revolutionary forces, struggling to speak in old ways and new ways simultaneously and finding those ways incompatible. Major Dundee is a mess, but how could so pure a representation of division and the failures of certain models of unification be anything but?

153 Even without a narrator-initiate twisting the details of the story to fit his own coming of heroic age by destroying Charriba, Major Dundee is a story of heroic simulation without representation wherein the protagonist redefines his outlaw heroism through an array of Others he eventually destroys. The inclusion of the narrator Ryan foregrounds the need for critical viewing to the point of excess, but the title sequence and the egomaniacal motivations of Dundee’s character are enough to illustrate that the film came together partly as a reflection of a director’s own egomaniacal struggle below the border. The artistic agency behind this production is dispersed among writers, actors, financiers, and the director himself, but Maior Dundee begins to reveal a directorial persona that will continue through The Wild Bunch, always immersed in the sociopolitics of hero-making yet always evasive about the potential of these heroes or the outlaw auteur to make the right choice. In the next chapter I read Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, a film over which he claimed to have more control, as a continuation of themes of revolutionary commitment and evasion on the part of the hero. Major Dundee suggests that its hero is irresponsibly detached from the myriad sociopolitical interests he encounters, accept where the groups he encounters can offer him heroic regeneration. The Wild Bunch focuses the choice of Peckinpah’s heroes specifically on their conunitment to or evasion of the Mexican revolution and, therefore, is a more lucid moral tale than its predecessor. Nevertheless, The Wild Bunch continues to explore its heroes’ actions in terms of self-interest, raising similar questions about the compatibility of the western hero with revolutionary interests.

154 CHAPTERS

“LET’S GO”: COMMITMENT, GENDER, AND MEXICO IN THE WILD BUNCH

Chapter Four reads Peckinpah’s Maior Dundee as an indictment of its hero’s sociopolitical disengagement Dundee is not so much reluctant as entirely evasive, and his heroic actions are largely self-serving. One might argue that Dundee achieves an assimilationist political agenda, his search for Charriba assimilating Southern, African American, and Mexican American troops into a common mission of subduing renegade Apaches. But this assimilation of multiple groups is shown to be primarily self-serving on Dundee’s part and destructive to the groups who are assimilated. Dundee is disengaged from the diversity of his unit, except where this diversity can be exploited or simulated for the Major’s gain. Therefore, heroism in the film is not in the service of reconciling diverse interests; rather, diverse interests, including Southern outlawry, renegade Indianness, and revolutionary Mexico, are exploited in the service of defining Dundee’s heroism. The fraudulence and solipsism of Dundee’s heroic agenda are perhaps clearest in his (dis)engagement with revolutionary Mexico, which Dundee superficially embraces to improve his image, but evenmally abandons, causing the deaths of almost an entire village of people. Heroic evasion of responsibility is masked by Major Dundee as the hero’s actions engage in hero-building minus actual commitment to or responsibility for a cause. In The Wild Bunch Peckinpah continues themes started with Dundee’s (dis)engagement with Teresa and Mexico. The Wild Bunch moves the Mexican setting from Juarista conflicts with the French in the 1860s to the Mexican Revolution of the twentieth century, but the themes associating Mexican femininity with revolutionary commitment continue. Pike Bishop and his band of outlaws at first glance seem less

155 irreparably detached than Dundee, and The Wild Bunch moves its outlaws superficially firom self-interest to political commitment, but the film problematizes its heroes' motives for commitment Therefore, The Wild Bunch moves firom self-interest to commitment but beneath this ^)parent commitment lurks more self-interest and the film ultimately interrogates the possibility that the western hero can be redeemed in the service of sociopolitical progress. Since the central argument of my dissertation is that reluctant heroes in 1960s westerns reflect larger ambivalences about the time. The Wild Bunch is a prime example of this trend. The director’s own attraction-repulsion to sociopolitical progress no doubt informs the film’s cynicism about the westem hero’s sociopolitical motives, and The Wild Bunch exemplifies a 1960s crisis of white masculinity wherein doing what is heroically right comes in conflict with a desire to preserve white patriarchy. Eulogizing Sam Peckinpah more than ten years after his 1984 death, Charles Higson (1995) writes, “The celebrity questiormaires also often ask the question ‘How would you like to die?’ Most people put‘Peacefully in my sleep.’ But I’m afraid I would still put ‘Spectacularly—like TheWild Bunch’” (36). There is something seductive about the end of The Wild Bunch fl969^ as the four remaining members of a band of outlaws take on a small army of federates in a bloodletting fusing the montage of Eisenstein’s

Odessa Steps with Homeric camage.26 There is also something terrifying in this final moment of violent catharsis, something driving Higson to be “afraid” to answer, “Spectacularly.” I too am afraid of The Wild Bunch. Not just of its violence but also of the ambiguity with which themes of Mexico and gender prefigure this violence, especially before the film’s final spectacular bloodletting. At the end of the film the band of outlaws is driven by bounty hunters to the stronghold of Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), to whom

Stephen Prince, in his introduction to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1999), describes the association of Peckinpah with the montage in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) as something “critics erroneously claim” (27). Certainly, there are important difierences in the styles of Eisenstein and Peckinpah, as Prince explores in his book Savage Cinema (1998) (55, 67). But the associations between the two directors are often made in order to note the extraordinary enthusiasm with which Peckinpah and editors Louis Lombardo and Robert L. Wolfe reclaim montage as a formal device. Peckinpah’s style is at odds with the seamless continuity cutting of the Hollywood studio era, though never as radical a departure from narrative continuity as work by Peckinpah’s contemporaries in the French New Wave. It is easy to read The Wild Bunch, even amidst the increasingly experimental Hollywood of the late 1960s, as a stylistic call to arms. 156 they have sold their souls and sold out their revolutionary friend Angel (Jaime Sanchez). Here Pike Bishop (William Holden) and the Gorch brothers , Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson), evade responsibility for Villa’s revolution by running into tlie arms of the oppressor’s prostitutes. Outside, overwhelmed with guilt over Mapache’s unchallenged torture of Angel, Dutch Engstrom (Ernest Borgnine) autoerotically and angrily whittles a stick. The Gorches argue over the price of their pleasure, until the guilty Pike flees the room of “his” woman and her child. One look from Pike stops the Gorches’ negotiations, until Pike gives the order “Let’s go.” Lyle’s eyes narrow to comprehend what lies unspoken in Pike’s words. “Why not?” he replies. And with that they are joined by Dutch with the common goal of getting Angel back or avenging him, violently. Angel is killed, but they get their revenge in a standoff with Mapache’s army. Like Major Dundee (1965), Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch might accurately be termed a “Mexico westem,” a filmic tradition including Viva Villa (1934), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Rio Grande (1950) Viva Zapata! (1952), Vera Cruz (1954), They Came to Cordura (1959), The Magnificent Seven (19601. The Alamo (1960), The Professionals (1966), 100 Rifles (1968), Villa Rides (19681. numerous Spaghetti westerns, and, less obviously since it substitutes Bolivia for Mexico, Butch Cassidv and the Sundance Kid (1969). Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre is widely acknowledged to be an influence on Peckinpah, and Peckinpah’s Mexico borrows stereotypes from Huston’s film as well as from the subgenre at large, stereotypes that are frequently touched upon in the criticism on Peckinpah or The Wild Bunch in particular. But Peckinpah’s treatment of Mexico in The Wild Bunch is still overshadowed by the overwhelming controversy surrounding the film’s violence and merits rediscovery in terms of the Peckinpah hero’s sociopolitical commitments or lack thereof. Even more in need of rediscovery is Peckinpah’s gender politics in The Wild Bunch. John L. Simons’s (1985) essay “The Tragedy of Love in The Wild Bunch.” now available in Bliss’s 1994 collection on the film, is a good start, as is Christopher Sharrett’s “Peckinpah the Radical: The Politics of The Wild Bunch” (1999). More can be said, however, about connections between Mexico and femininity in Peckinpah’s phallocentric universe and about how these connections reveal Peckinpah’s ambivalence about 157 progressive sociopolitical movements of his era. Molly Haskell’s aforementioned dismissal of Peckinpah’s auteurism as "homy male stuff,” in a 1975 interview by F. Anthony Macklin, is hardly as unfair as the director’s apologists claim (23). Haskell’s is an understandable response to the hyperbolic and largely fratriarchal director-worship of an era when auteur theory apologized for the disturbing politics of stylists like Peckinpah by appealing to the “radical” nature of their formal innovations. Moreover, Peckinpah’s world is so obviously male-centered and frequently marked by overt moments of misogyny that Haskell’s dismissal may be better read as legitimate political boycott than as simple distaste for Peckinpah’s work. However, dismissing Peckinpah on the grounds of his sexism has its downside insofar as it ends the discussion, and this is unfortunate since Peckinpah’s work is a remarkably detailed fossil, perhaps prehistoric, of the sociopolitics of the westem hero in the 1960s. Peckinpah’s films are sexist, but they are also about their own sexism in peculiar ways, and Peckinpah’s gift as a director is in his ability to explore his own sociopolitical moral ambiguity through that of his heroes. In the following reading of The Wild Bunch, usually acknowledged to be Peckinpah’s greatest film, I explore the problem of its westem heroes’ apparent progression from sociopolitical detachment to revolutionary commitment. This revolutionary commitment is expressed through the bunch’s final attempts to free and, failing that, avenge their Mexican-revolutionary friend Angel. But the revolutionary commitment of the bunch is rendered ironic by the film’s gender subtext, wherein male misogyny is used to resolve male fears about commitment to female characters and to the revolution at large. More significantly the film's gender subtext reveals motives of conquest lurking just beneath revolutionary idealism, and this gender subtext is specifically tied to Peckinpah’s image of 1913 revolutionary Mexico throughout the film. I will, with the assistance of David Weddle’s thorough Peckinpah biography, show how details in Peckinpah’s life are translated into the film, particularly through the film’s chief protagonist Pike Bishop. And I will suggest that The Wild Bunch is best read not as a specific allegory of Viemam, as has sometimes been argued, but as the director’s evasive response to myriad sociopolitical moments of turmoil in the late 1960s. Peckinpah is clearly self- conscious about the sociopolitical implications of his westem film as it pertains to the 158 possibility of revolution and the way gender difference informs revolution. This has led some of his apologists, like Sharrett, to call him a “radical.” It has often been assumed that generic critique constitutes social critique insofar as critique of conventions reveals the ideological underpinnings of genre. However, if this is partly true in Peckinpah’s films, he also evades commitment through his fihnic treatises on the limitations of genre heroism and masculinity insofar as his films wallow in their heroes’ sociopolitical limitations without a clear indication of what action is to follow generic critique. This evasion begins in Major Dundee. The cavalry film reveals the limitations of Amos Dundee by showing how his construction of heroic identity relies on the forced assimilation and death of racial and regional Others. But Peckinpah and company’s discovery of these limitations is not in and of itself radical; rather, the film is the beginning of Peckinpah’s wallowing in the sociopolitical limitations of the westem hero. With The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah focuses his vision with less interference from studios or producers, and the result is one of the most complex westems of all time. The Wild Bunch is wrought with irony about its surface notion that the bunch can learn revolutionary values, and this irony functions as a critique of idealism about the westem hero. But this irony ultimately leaves Peckinpah still searching for the sociopolitical potential of the hero. The remainder of this chapter is divided into five sections, the first of which is a summary of the film. Following this brief summary is a section dedicated to the issue of violence in The Wild Bunch. I am less interested in violence in general than in gendered violence related to the revolutionary commitment or evasion of the film’s heroes, but the violence in the film has inspired a great deal of controversy since its initial release and, therefore, bears mentioning. Next, there are two sections related directly to the director. In the first of these sections I chronicle some of the director’s encounters with revolutionary politics. In the second I explore the Peckinpah hero as iconically intertwined with the persona of Peckinpah himself. Finally, the chapter closes with a reading of The Wild Bunch in terms of its themes of Mexico, gender, revolutionary engagement, and reflexivity.

159 SUMMARY

Placed beside Major Dundee, the plot of The Wild Bunch is comparatively lucid but still detailed. At the film’s opening the bunch, in U. S. army disguises, rides into the Texas border town of Starbuck, where they witness some children torturing a scorpion with an army of ants. In Starbuck they attempt to rob the Pecos and South Texas R. R. Administrative Offices, but they soon realize they have been trapped by men hiding on the roof of a nearby building. These men are railroad despot Harrigan (Albert Dekker), Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), and a largely incompetent band of bounty hunters including the comic duo of Coffer (Strother Martin) and T. C. (L. Q. Jones)During the shootout between the bunch and bounty hunters, most of the town is massacred and a number of the outlaws are killed, including the aptly named Crazy Lee (Bo Hopkins), who Pike has asked to stay behind and cover some hostages. Fleeing the massacre, the outlaws pass the sadistic children they saw earlier, who are now burning the scorpion and ants in grass, an image that dissolves to Coffer and T. C. pillaging the corpses of Starbuck as Harrigan threatens to send Pike’s former partner Thornton back to Yuma prison if he fails to ride after and kill the bunch. Meanwhile the surviving bunch crosses the Rio Grande for revolutionary Mexico, where they meet up with an old coot named Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien) who Pike claims “did his share of killing and more” in the old days. Here they discover that the railroad office gave them common steel washers instead of gold. Broke and desperate, the bunch visits Angel’s Mexican village, which they find has been raided by th&federales of Mapache, an implied cohort of the historical Huerta. Angel is infuriated that Mapache has killed his father and taken his apparently willing “sweetheart” Teresa (Sonia Amelio), but he values his outlaw lifestyle with the bunch and agrees to go with Pike’s band to Agua Verde in order to sell horses to Mapache. In Agua Verde, the outlaws find Germans Mohr (Fernando Wagner) and Ernst (Jorge Rada) meddling in the revolution on the side of Mapache and Huerta. But the Germans are obviously more interested in embroiling the United States in a costly war

Coffer and T. C. are Shakespearean grotesques in the spirit of Falstaff, but their more immediate source is Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (1958), with its bickering homoerotic duo who also inspired C-3PO and R2- D2 in Star Wars (19771. 160 with Mexico to keep the U. S. out of the Great War. Angel sees Teresa in the arms of Mapache and shoots her, which nearly gets the bunch killed for attempting to assassinate the general. When Mapache realizes Angel has acted out of jealous rage, the men all have a good laugh. Mapache offers the bunch a drink, and the outlaws eventually agree to steal guns from a U. S. train in Texas. They rob the train, only to find Thornton’s bounty hunters waiting on board. Chased by Thornton’s men and the U. S. army, the outlaws flee back into Mexico, giving Angel one case of the guns so that his allies, revolutionary Indians fighting with Pancho Villa, are armed against Mapache. Teresa’s mother reveals Angel’s betrayal of Mapache, and Angel is captured, forcing Dutch, who is with Angel, to leave his friend without a fight. But when the bunch is chased by Thornton back into Agua Verde, leaving the wounded Sykes behind, they surrender to their guilt over Angel, Sykes, and the revolution. They leave the arms of Mapache’s prostitutes and march into the center of his army for their friend. Mapache kiUs Angel, and Pike kills Mapache. Then Mohr. Then many more as, trapped by Mapache’s army, the bunch dies fighting against overwhelming numbers. In the ruins of the battle, Thornton takes a revolver from the holster of his dead friend and sits until Sykes arrives with the patriarch of Angel’s village Don José (Chano Urueta). Thornton and Sykes join the revolution against Huerta, and the film ends with a flashback to the bunch’s romantic exit firom Angel’s village.

“HIS SHARE OF KILLING AND MORE”: VIOLENCE IN THE Wn.D BUNCH

As even a plot summary of the film reveals, the revolution and femininity figure prominently in the actions of the bunch. Before discussing Mexico and gender in The Wild Bunch, however, a word on the film’s violence, because this issue has enraged, titillated, and otherwise preoccupied critics and audiences since its initial release. In 1995 The Wild Bunch returned to movie screens with footage deleted from the film shortly after its 1969 release. Peckinpah’s original cut of the film was rereleased under the guidance of Martin 161 Scorsese, Robert Harris, Gamer Simmons, and Paul Seydor (Weddle 376). The newly restored footage contained scenes lending depth to character motivation as well as lending thematic depth I will describe later in my reading. This restoration, according to consummate Peckinpah specialist Paul Seydor’s Peckinpah: The Westem Films: A Reconsideration (1997), “is absolutely trae to the version that Sam Peckinpah himself prepared and authorized for release in 1969 and representshis final cut of The Wild Bunch” (153). In an absurd moment of déjà vu the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) slapped the restored Wild Bunch with an NC-17 rating (Weddle 377). According to Seydor this rating would have rendered the film uiunarketable in movie houses and the Blockbuster video chain all over the country (147). And the NC-17 was a particularly startling setback since the film had already received an R rating in 1969 (Weddle 364). In fact, for the 1969 release Peckinpah voluntarily trimmed off bratahty that the studio and producer Phil Feldman wanted to keep. The director did the trimming in order to remove violence the he called “excessive to the points I wanted to make” (Seydor 139).28 Since the director’s cut adds no new violence and actually restores character exposition that helps to make sense of the violence that is in the film, Peckinpah’s apologists respond to the near NC-17 fiasco as standard Hollywood hypocrisy: “Dozens of other recent ‘action’ movies starring Amold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, and others have been packed with graphic violence that goes far beyond anything in The Wild Bunch” (Weddle 377). Weddle attributes Peckinpah’s controversy not to graphic violence but to his “ability to provoke complex reactions to that violence, to simultaneously arouse excitement and horror in his viewers and cause them to look inward at their own hearts.” Charles Higson’s trepidations urge to die “Spectacularly” like the bunch claims a similar “excitement and horror.” And Paul Schrader (1969,1994) seems equally convinced that Peckinpah’s is a double edged sword: “At the final level, the most difficult, Peckinpah goes beyond vicariousness to superfluity. We no longer want the violence, but it’s still coming” (23). The implication in these and other defenses of Peckinpah’s violence is that The 1995 Wild Bunch earned its R thanks to the “legwork” of archivist Leith Adams, who found the original MPAA certificate for the film (Seydor 148).

162 movie-goers love violence, but they do not like to think about it. This assumption is economically expressed in Richard T. Jameson’s (1981) description of Peckinpah detractors as hypocrites “who get so mad about movie violence, that they want to break something” (34). The fact that the rerelease of Peckinpah’s movie could be so controversial, while movies that fetishize death as much as Titanic (1997) or killing as much as almost any 1990s action film were not, is a testament to the validity of these defenses of Peckinpah. But the apologists assume too much about Peckinpah’s detractors, many of whom no doubt have always understood the possible critique inherent in hyperbole and have simply detested having to look at so much violent death.^9

The most productive way to approach the violence in The Wild Bunch is to ask: What does this violence accomplish? Peckinpah, like his defenders, claimed the film to be a self-conscious exploration of violence. The director argues: The point of the film is to take this facade of movie violence, open it up, get people involved in it so that they are starting to go in the Hollywood-television predictable reaction syndrome, and then twist it so that it’s not fun any more, just a wave of sickness in the gut (qtd. in Harmetz 170) But Peckinpah also supplemented his defense of the film as a critique of violence with other political claims: we had a particular story to make, and we thought that we had a point to make about violence—that it’s awful, this kind of violence. Other kinds of violence may be very necessary; the violence in a pro football game is certainly fascinating to millions, and I thoroughly enjoy it. But I don’t drink we should say it doesn’t exist and we should destroy violence—by what means? You can’t legislate against it. On the one hand, you have the violent protests of these kids today, which I believe in. Some of the racial problems have only been brought to the public attention through violence. Then you can deal with the horror of President Kennedy’s assassination and his brother’s death. But a political assassination has very litde to do with film violence. I don’t think television had too much to do with training either Oswald or Sirhan. (qtd. in Farber 41) The defense of television and film violence at the end of this quotation is a familiar feature of popular debates about media influence, from Kennedy to Columbine. Whatever the merits of this defense of the media against political panaceas, Peckinpah’s claim that a film

I, for example, dislike Oliver Stone’s Natural Bom Killers (1994), the director’s “indictment” of our lust for media violence and MTV. I dislike the movie not so much because I find the violence repulsive but because I find the violently MTV-style editing tedious, as tiresome and commercial an appropriation of avant-garde techniques as MTV itself often is. Congratulations to Mr. Stone for so thoroughly fusing form and content about form! 163 can show violence to be “awful” must allow the corresponding possibility that film can show violence to be fun. Peckinpah admits this much in the Harmetz piece when he describes the “Hollywood-television predictable reaction syndrome.” Clearly the director himself is unsure about violence. In response to the controversy, Peckinpah scrambled for explanations for the violence in his film. He “passed out copies of Robert Ardrey’s Afiican Genesis by the dozens” to justify his claims that humanity is bom violent, but he only read the book after releasing The Wild Bunch (Harmetz 170). It is likely that Peckinpah was desperate to intellectualize the brutality in the film, an absurd proposition given the movie’s inclination to opt for visceral energy instead of didactic statements about violence. It is dangerous to read Peckinpah’s comments about the film after its release in terms of his intentions for making the movie, but these comments at least illustrate the crowds the director sought to please or displease immediately after the film’s release and, therefore, tell us something about his politics. At the height of protests over the escalating violence in Vietnam, Peckinpah’s “awful” and unavoidable violence articulates that his sympathy with pacifism is tempered by either a cynicism or skepticism about the notion that war can be stopped. Even more interesting is Peckinpah’s use of violent anti-racist protests as justification for his film. Compared with films like Soldier Blue (1970) and Little Big Man (1970), The Wild Bunch is far less explicitly mariceted at the youth culture informed by Civil Rights and anti-war protests. However, beginning with Major Dundee (1965) and his script for Villa Rides (1968), Peckinpah was interested in revolutionary heroism at odds with the bmtal realities underlying revolutionary idealism. Moreover, Peckinpah’s biography indicates that this interest was instilled in the director long before his career in film.

164 i VIVA PECKINPAH!; PORTRAIT OF A RELUCTANT REVOLUTIONARY

David Weddle notes Peckinpah’s earliest experiences with people’s revolutionary politics and the violence of revolution in China when the future director served in the United States Marines in 1945. Marines were officially stationed in China to “disarm and repatriate the Japanese ” but Weddle notes, “it soon became clear to the marines that their government was also using them to prop up Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Regime” (53). With Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s communists no longer allied against Japanese invaders, violent conflicts over the future of China emerged, drawing cautious U. S. intervention at the birth of the Cold War. Despite U. S. media efforts to present the conflict as a battle between Mao’s “godless red hordes and Chiang Kai-shek's noble fieedom fighters,” many marines witnessed the corruption and rigid rank distinctions in the Nationalist army, not to mention public beheadings (54-57). Here, Weddle notes, young Sam first witnessed death in slow motion when a sniper’s bullet killed a man on a train in a surreal moment of trauma that seemed to elongate time. And here also Sam began to build a lifetime of experiences with prostitution. Lastly, in China Sam saw “noble freedom fighters,” both the Chinese Nationalists and the American military, commit acts of unthinkable bmtality. One story in particular, which Peckinpah told Life in 1972, is a vivid depiction of the violence of the Americans and its contagious effect on the young man: Another Marine told me—boasted to me—that he’d thrown a Chinese woman down on the concrete platform and raped her, hit her head against the pavement, and after he was done she didn’t move. I’d been practically adopted by a Chinese family. I actually decided I was going to kill him. I went out and stole a gun, a Russian gun, and offered to sell it to him. You know, the souvenir mentality. When I sold it to him, I was going to kill him. Put the barrel of the gun right up under his chin and pull the trigger. The night before our meeting, I saw him standing there, completely blind. He’d drunk some bad whiskey. If it hadn’t been for that, I might be in prison today, (qtd. in Weddle 58)

165 This story may be accurate or embellished, but either way it is significant that Peckinpah told it after The Wild Bunch because this incident balances the “necessity” of violence with the horrible underside of heroic intervention, both American intervention and Peckinpah’s own. Another significant detail about Peckinpah’s experiences in China is his love for a young communist, who his first wife Marie Selland describes as a “young, beautiful Chinese woman, but with glasses and a big heavy sweater, looking very serious” (qtd. in Weddle 58). According to Weddle, the young communist, talked about the Marxist vision of the people taking over from their oppressors, of doing away with all the emperors and warlords, about a land where everyone would live in harmony and brotherhood. She did not convert him. He had been too deeply inculcated by the ragged individualist creed of the American West to ever cherish becoming an anonymous member of a collective, and had already seen too much of the dark side of human nature to genuinely believe that a utopia could come from the hands of man. But the dream, the desperate longing for a better world, that he understood. (58-59) Weddle’s choices as a biographer are rich, and Weddle is also astute in noting that Peckinpah, after discovering John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico (1914), identified the Mexican revolution with both China and his own sociopolitical milieu: the Mexican revolution “was China in 1945, America in 1967” (296). But how do these experiences translate into the fabric of The Wild Bunch? One approach to this question might draw strength from the work of Richard Slotkin (1993) and Michael Coyne (1997), both of whom emphasize The Wild Bunch as part of the Viemamization of the western. Slotkin, in particular, reads the The Wild Bunch as a filmic indictment of the “inadequacy of mercenary values—and by analogy, of American capitalism—as a solution to the problem of the Revolution” (602). The Wild Bunch represents, for Slotkin, the American failure in Viemam; an attempt to rescue “the people,” i.e., Angel and the people in Mapache’s Agua Verde, quickly sours and turns to massacre. According to this allegorical reading of the film, the Americans fundamentally fail to understand the needs of the people in Mexico/Viemam:

166 It is Peckinpah’s emphasis on this particular failure of imaginative understanding that makes The Wild Bunch exceptional as a commentary on the counterinsurgency project in Vietnam. The Bunch’s failures are the fictional counterparts of the failures that crippled the “mission” from its inception, particularly the failure to understand the power and complexiQr of the extant political culture in Viemam in the South no less than the North. (610) Slotkin’s woric on the politics of the western is quite remarkable, and his reading of The Wild Bunch is plausible but also limiting. Slotkin’s analysis was written before Weddle’s biography, but the similarities between U. S. intervention in China and in Viemam are obvious enough to suggest that Peckinpah may have intended the film partly as a response to his country’s Cold War policy in general. The limitations of the Viemam argument, however, lie in its inclination to substimte the specific allegorical equation of Peckinpah’s Mapache with Ngo Dinh Diem or Ho Chi Minh for the more general allegorical relationship between Peckinpah’s film and the emergence of postwar white masculinity. As scholars of texmal analysis, we are often not trained to see a fallacy in specificity, but the allegorical approach to genre lends itself to just such a fallacy, wherein the critic must finally decide which of Peckinpah’s Mexicans represent North Viemam, which represent South Viemam, and etcetera. I have no doubt that the production and initial reception of The Wild Bunch were informed by Viemam, but Viemamized readings of the film and the genre must be supplemented by an understanding of Peckinpah’s and his generation’s general experiences with gender, revolution, and political commitment. Certainly, from an economic standpoint it pays for a movie to be more sociopolitically vague than Slotkin’s reading grants, as to offend as little of the audience as possible.30 However, since The Wild

Bunch has consistently offended so many, a critic might do better to locate the namre of the

This may at least partly explain why Variety’s 1991 list of distributor rentals for westerns lists Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at $45,953,000 and The Wild Bunch at $5,300,000 (Hardy 374). Both moyies were released the same year, and both deal with outlaws drawn from the Butch Cassidy legend going south of the border and standing off large armies. But Butch Cassidy is not only less grim than The Wild Bunch but also less explicit in its interest in reyolutionary politics and in its exploration of the yiolent underbelly of western heroism. Of course, there are many other differences between the films as well, including marketing differences and differences between the associations now summoned by the titles alone. Audiences haye often been drawn to Butch Cassidy’s ability to entertain and to The Wild Bunch, though also entertaining, through its controyersy. 167 film’s politics in ambivalences of the director and his time, particularly surrounding issues of American gender politics and how these issues relate to the commitments of the film’s heroes.

THE PECKINPAH HERO

Major Dundee’s hero resembles Sam Peckinpah in his reckless individualism, his disregard for authority, and his egomaniacal insistence on total leadership of his motley band. With The Wild Bunch the coimections between chief protagonist Pike Bishop and Sam Peckinpah are even more pronounced than the reflexivity in Major Dundee, certainly more deliberately pronounced not only by Peckinpah’s intentions but by those of his performers. Paul Seydor cautions against critics trying to “yoke [an artist] to what this or that character says as a way of getting at his so-called ideas,” quoting Peckinpah’s refusal to get between his audience and his story as support (176). But Seydor would probably concede a reflexive playfulness in Peckinpah’s characterizations, a playfulness that is the collaborative product of the director and his actors. David Weddle writes; As shooting progressed, Holden began, more and more, to resemble Peckinpah. It wasn’t just the thin mustache that Sam had insisted he wear; Holden had begun to take on the vocal qualities and mannerisms of his director. Lou Lombardo recalls: “I told Holden one day after dailies, T got you figured, you’re doing Sam.’ He was running that Wild Bunch just like Sam was mnning the movie. His gestures, his tone of voice, it was all Sam. He picked up on that. I told Sam that. He said, ‘Ah, you’re full of shit!’ I said, ‘No, I’m telling you, the guy’s got you!’” (336) Weddle further writes that “Sam’s children got the chills when they first saw some of the completed sequences.” Daughter Sharon Peckinpah also notes this resemblance on the documentary The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage (1996), by Seydor and Nick Redman: Holden was wonderful. He was a great reflector of something in my father. There are so many things that he did in The Wild Bunch that reminded me of Dad. In the scene where they’re in Angel’s village [and Angel is outraged over Mapache’s raid], the way Holden was sitting, his physicality reminded my very much of my father. He kind of rests his elbow on his knee and says to Jaime Sanchez, “Either you learn to live with it or we’ll leave you here.” I thought, “Oh, Dad, I must have heard things like that a million times from you.” 168 None of this is to suggest that Pike Bishop represents the sum total of Peckinpah’s opinions. Nor is this necessarily to say that the director was secretly directing Holden to play Sam Peckinpah. Neither argument is necessary. The connection here between Pike and Peckinpah requires at least one agent other than Peckinpah, i.e., Holden, if not Lombardo and Sharon Peckinpah as well. And this connection reveals the auteur not simply as the primary agent in the production of the film but rather as a persona understood by cast, crew, and some viewers to be part of the film’s content. Holden was well aware of Peckinpah’s conflict with producer Bresler on Major Dundee and that Peckinpah had been fired by producer Martin Ransohoff fiom the set of the film The Cincinnati Kid (1965). Furthermore, Holden most likely saw infinite similarities between Peckinpah’s uncompromising but obsessive directing and Pike Bishop’s similar leadership. For example, at one point Pike settles an argument by growling, ‘1 don’t know a damned thing except I either lead this bunch or end it right now,” easily a Peckinpah mantra as much as a character’s line. Lastly, Peckinpah, if not infusing Bishop with one simple Peckinpah ideology, was himself aware of connections and made comments to Stephen Farber in 1969 associating himself with the characters in The Wild Bunch: The outlaws of the West have always fascinated me. They had a certain notoriety; they were supposed to have a Robin Hood quality about diem, which was not really the truth, but they were strong individuals; in a land for all intents and purposes without law, they made their own. I suppose I’m something of an outlaw myself. I identify with them. (42) Peckinpah’s sense of his own outlaw heroism must be partly tempered by his sense that he too is no Robin Hood, and the director and his crew seem willing to reference Peckinpah’s status as outiaw auteur through film, as evidenced in the film’s tides. Major Dundee’s dtles close with producer Jerry Bresler credited over the image of a burning building, followed by Peckinpah’s director credit as the building collapses. The extent to which these credits self-consciously reference the turmoil between the director and the producer depends on the point in production when they were designed, which I do not know. There was sufficient conflict between the men throughout production to justify reading these credits as intentional self-reflexivity, but it was during final editing that 169 Peckinpah was most betrayed by the producer to the point of Peckinpah’s asking that his director’s credit be removed from the film, which may have left Bresler’s name alone on the burning and collapsing building. By the time of The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah had seen his name dragged through the mud by Bresler and the Dundee debacle, had been fired from The Cincinnati Kid, and had been, because of his reputation in Hollywood, untouchable by the studios. He worked furiously on screenplays for James Gould Cozzens’s dystopian fantasy Castawav (1934) and Max Evans’s Hi Lo Countrv (1961), but his only directorial achievement between Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch was a 1966 television adaptation of Katherine Aim Porter’s Noon Wine (1937) for Stage 67 (Weddle 272-295). Therefore, by The Wild Bunch’s opening credits, few in Hollywood who were familiar with Peckinpah at all would be unaware of the mythology surrounding the difficult or uncompromising artist fighting the studio. The increasingly notorious personality of the outlaw director is what makes the credits of The Wild Bunch if not a serious commentary on the artistic process at least a good joke about the controversy. The film opens with a still photograph of the bunch riding alongside railroad tracks, an image of the heroes and their enemy the railroad on which is superimposed the Warners logo and “A Phil Feldman Production.” Then, the title of the film. Between the stills, the action moves as the bunch rides into Starbuck. Stills begin to accumulate. A freeze frame of Pike with the credit for Holden. A freeze frame of Dutch with Borgnine’s credit. Then a freeze frame with Ryan’s credit, but Deke Thornton, who has been forced to hunt his friends in exchange for freedom, is not yet visually introduced. Instead, “Robert Ryan” is superimposed over a still of horses’ asses, a fitting image for a Judas, if a bit unfair to the complexity of Thomton’s bind.^1 As the mayor of Starbuck (Dub Taylor) preaches at the Temperance Union, the film cuts away to an impressionistic, wide still of the street and the credit for cinematographer Lucian Ballard. Film editor Lou Lombardo’s credit is superimposed over a still containing a sign advertising “Job Printing.” The composer of the film’s score, Jerry Fielding, gets a musical flourish for his credit as the bunch dismounts. Panavision gets a wide angle shot, of course. And the writers Walon Green,

One of my former students, Gary Damico, also pointed out this joke on Thomton/Ryan when we recently screened the film. 170 Sam Peckinpah, and Roy N. Sickner get a rooftop crane shot, a point of view fi-om above that is a reflexive reference to artistic vision but also mysterious in narrative terms insofar as it is not yet revealed that Thornton, Harrigan, and the bounty hunters are hiding on a roof. Suddenly, Harrigan nudges Thornton on the roof, saying, "Thornton, wake up... look,” and the source of point of view is then revealed to be Deke Thornton, though in the service of Harrigan and railroad money. As Thornton looks down upon the bunch, the screen freezes again: “Produced by Phil Feldman.” The producer’s credit is superimposed over Thomton’s shoulder, indirectly in the line of his point of view. Phil Feldman and Sam Peckinpah got along very well until after the film’s first screenings, when Feldman cut flashbacks without Peckinpah’s consent. Therefore, the credit’s equation of Feldman, the producer overlooking the project, with Thornton overlooking the outlaws is less a jab at the specific producer than a comment or even a joke about Peckinpah’s past traumatic ordeals with producers. Certainly, Feldman may have gladly complied with the joke, since he and Peckinpah were on good terms. In any event, the reflexive use of the stills to credit the talent but also to align these credits with thematically appropriate visual material displays a self-consciousness about the filmmaking process and supports the possibility of self-consciousness elsewhere in the film, as in Holden’s portrayal of Pike Bishop to resemble the director. The Peckinpah/Pike connection is most thoroughly established with the director’s credit. As the outlaws manhandle railroad employees. Bishop orders: “If they move . . . kill 'em!” The image freezes on Bishop. Superimposed is, of course, the name of the master of death in motion: “Sam Peckinpah.” The Peckinpah credit with Bishop’s line has rarely escaped notice. In fact, Weddle’s biography borrows the line as a suitable slogan for the Peckinpah image created through the controversy surrounding the director’s violence. But the correspondence of the Bishop line with the Peckinpah credit is best read as part of a larger self-reflexive project, of which all of the above examples are a part.

171 PROGRESS AND PECKINPAH: MEXICO, GENDER, REVOLUTION

In addition to making a fine joke as a Peckinpah credo, ‘Tf they move... kill 'em!" directly references the film’s association of motion, or lack thereof, with death. On one hand, the band of outlaws stmggle to keep moving against the overwhelming tide of capitalist avarice.32 On the other hand, motion itself crushes the spirit of the western hero, especially motion in the form of capitalistic and imperialistic progress exemplified by the cartoonish supervillainy of railroad man Harrigan. But another “progress” in The Wild Bunch, in fact the opposite of Harrigan’s railroad, is progressive politics, and the crisis of movement in the film has a great deal to do with Peckinpah’s cynicism about the progressive dream of a society free of economic, national, and perhaps gender exploitation. Peckinpah’s notion of capitalism, as that which drives the hideous villainy of the railroad and that which corrupts the bunch’s sympathies toward Villa’s revolution, is pe±aps the most obvious contemporary sociopolitical reference in the film. Moreover, national exploitation is made explicit in the form of the German “advisors” to Mapache and, more subtextually, in the resemblances between Peckinpah’s Mexico and Vietnam discussed by Slotkin. It is fitting then that the bunch’s final shootout with Mapache’s army symbolically frees “the people” from both the powerful despot Mapache and German intervention as, furthermore, it models heroic behaviors for Thomton.33 Thornton, after taking Pike’s revolver, joins the revolution and simultaneously frees himself from Harrigan’s control. It is additionally fitting that Pike’s decision to take action against Mapache is expressed in the literally progressive line: “Let’s go.” This line, however, also contains the film’s chief irony. On one level, it indicates commitment to action, ostensibly in the service of revolution. On another level, however, “Let’s go” is just more running, indicating the levels of sociopolitical evasion lurking just below the surface of Pike’s discovery of

This is a theme explored by Bliss in ‘“Back Off to What?’ Enclosure, Violence, and Capitalism in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch” (1999).

Slotkin argues that this freedom of “the people” is misinformed, that the rescue of Angel is a surgical military maneuver that turns into a bloodbath. 172 commitment. Moreover, as “Let’s go” forces the bunch to fight for Angel it also represents a literal departure from the rooms of Mapache’s prostitutes, indicating that the bunch’s final commitment to Angel cannot be seen outside of its gendered terms. The theme of gendered revolution south of the border is explored in Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, where the hero’s commitment to Mexican villagers oppressed by the French is tied to his commitment to the revolutionary heroine Teresa. Dundee’s liberation of Teresa’s village firom the French earns him graffiti proclaiming, “Viva Dundee.” But this liberation is motivated by his selfish quest for military glory, and, when Dundee allows the French to escape so his men will not be tied down as jailers, Teresa’s village is brutally massacred by French retaliation. The final symbol of the selfishness underlying Dundee’s liberation of the village and his corresponding romantic love for Teresa is when she catches him with a prostitute in Durango. Beneath his romantic motives, for love and revolution, there lurks something cheap and self-serving. Major Dundee complicates the hero’s revolutionary intentions at the same time as it complicates his romantic intentions towards Teresa, the two being thematically similar in the film. The Wild Bunch, however, replaces Senta Berger’s flawed but committed Teresa with Sonia Amelio’s Teresa, the woman who betrays Angel by becoming Mapache’s lover. Peckinpah shifts from the young female victim of Ride the High Countrv (1962) and the committed Teresa of Major Dundee to the deceitful Teresa of The Wild Bunch, a movie populated with women for sale in a landscape far more harsh and criminal than any previous Peckinpah vision.34 When Angel confronts Teresa at Agua Verde, asking her in Spanish about her departure from the village, she answers that she has also left Angel for her new man Mapache, then laughs at Angel, kisses Mapache, and crudely sticks her tongue in the General’s ear. Teresa’s outlandishly sadistic response to Angel’s pain and, after he shoots her, the shared laughter between the bunch and Mapache’s army over Teresa’s bloody death indicates a director lost in sexist paranoia as misogynistic as anything in the history of film noir. But Peckinpah’s direction, like that in most good film noir, allows for the possibility that this femme fatale’s motives are far from uncomplicated. As Teresa laughs at Angel, tears well in her eyes, and her kissing Mapache suggests a

The notable exception to the general harshness of landscape in the film is Angel’s idealized village. 173 show for Angel and herself, an effort to claim for herself some agency in a world of rapist tyrants and bankrupt male heroism. It is important, for example, that Angel, by joining a life of banditry with the Anglos, was not in his village to defend Teresa’s honor. This betrayal of his lover along with her need for self-preservation informs her outlandish behavior in Agua Verde. More ambiguously, Teresa licking the inside of Mapache’s ear recalls Crazy Lee sticking his tongue in the ear of a female hostage in Starbuck. The equation of these very different characters—i.e., Mapache with the Starbuck woman, Teresa with Crazy Lee—may at first seem ridiculous, but the similarities between the scenes are revealing. Teresa’s action does not align Mapache with the Starbuck woman so much as it aligns Angel with the Starbuck woman. The Starbuck hostage is a Victorian prude "earning” Crazy Lee’s crass overtures when she calls him “trash” just as Angel is an idealist unable to sympathize with Teresa but eager to call her a “whore.” Moreover, Teresa, like Crazy Lee, has been irresponsibly left behind by her protector. Teresa has been abandoned by Angel, and Crazy Lee is little more than a teenager who Pike has selfishly sacrificed. Christopher Sharrett notes Angel’s moral ambiguity by way of critiquing readings of The Wild Bunch that equate Angel with “utopian dreams and revolutionary fervor” modeled for the morally lost Pike Bishop (84). To Sharrett, critical celebrations of Angel’s revolutionary commitment overlook that the male code of heroism in the film seems “morally bankrupt from its inception”: “Angel is a revolutionary, but he is also a belligerent misogynist; by relating him to the young Pike, we see the doomed nature of Angel’s dream” (84-85). Sharrett’s reading of Angel argues for Peckinpah’s self-consciousness about misogyny, and I agree there is a self-consciousness about Teresa’s death. The shared laughter of men after her shooting is the beginning of the bunch’s selling out to Mapache against the revolution and, therefore, functions as a destructive homosocial spectacle foreshadowing the demise of Mapache’s army and the bunch in the film’s final

battle. In fact, Dutch’s laughter at Teresa’s killing seems particularly f o r c e d . 3 5 This is not to absolve Peckinpah of indulging in a sexist set piece, itself so effective a spectacle of misogyny that it is irresponsible whatever its larger narrative purposes. But it is significant His laughter before the last battle, when he realizes they are doomed to die at the hands of Mapache’s army, is more absurd but recalls his forced laughter over Teresa’s murder. 174 thematically that the bunch’s first introduction to Mapache, an introduction that will put them in the General’s employment against Angel’s people, is accomplished through male violence against a woman. The thematic significance of the bunch’s gendered betrayal of the revolution is reiterated when a funereal procession of praying women intrude upon negotiations between Mapache and the bunch. They intrude to protest Teresa’s death. This scene begins as Mapache, drunk and standing before a mirror, primps himself for plaruiing the robbery, an image that should confirm Sharrett’s suspicion that elsewhere in the film Mapache represents “machismo rampant and ridiculous” (86). Teresa’s murder and the procession of women are the logical violent result of Angel’s confusion of the “romantic and the real,” particularly his inclinations to idealize his sweetheart, which speaks to what Sharrett sees as the film’s larger attempts to debunk the romantic heroic code of the western (85). However, these two scenes also represent tension found elsewhere in the film regarding femininity and male action. The protesting women are, as is fiequently the case in patriarchal adventures, an intrusion upon the action of men, but idealized femininity, like Teresa’s, informs male action. Two of Pike’s flashbacks, eventually removed from the film by the producer but restored for the current director’s cut in the 1990s, balance the tension between the feminine as motivation and as distraction. In the first flashback, in which younger outlaws Thornton and Pike are partying with some prostitutes, Thornton stmggles to convince Pike that they are in danger of being captured. Pike belittles Thomton’s caution right before detectives barge into the room, shooting and capturing Thornton as Pike escapes. In another flashback, after the visit to Angel’s village, the murder of Teresa, and the planning with Mapache, Pike remembers Aurora (Aurora Clavel), a woman with whom he once had an affair until her husband returned to kill her and wound Pike’s leg. The first of these flashbacks establishes Pike’s guilt over Thomton’s capture against a backdrop of female danger: i.e., the prostitutes, like Circe in The Odvssev. dangerously mire the male wanderer.36 The

John L. Simons (1985, 1994) writes, “Pike Bishop resembles Odysseus—and all heroic adventurers including the archetype of the male-female split in American literature. Cooper’s Deerslayer—in his inability to resolve, except destructively, the warring male and female impulses which coexist within him” (94).

175 second establishes Pike’s guilt over Aurora.^? Both flashbacks, however, are far more complex in their minute thematic details than this brief description allows and deserve more careful reading. The flashback to Thomton’s capture follows the bunch’s discovery that they have stolen washers instead of gold. Discovering the washers, Lyle complains that he and Tector plarmed to use the railroad money to find “new territory.” Pike rebuts that he used his money to set up the robbery while Lyle and Tector were “rurming whores in Hondo.” Pike jokes that he too should have been running whores instead of working to steal army disguises for the bunch, and the tension of the botched robbery dissolves as Dutch jokes that Lyle and Tector were lining up whores “in tandem.” Mexican children at a nearby gate join in laughing with the bunch. Then, a brief scene has Thornton telling the bounty hunters that Pike is “the best” because, “He never got caught,” and the film dissolves to Pike and Dutch planning “one more score” as Angel serenades a Mexican girl and some children. As Pike discusses plans to rob the railroad, Dutch warns, “They’ll be waiting for us,” to which Pike responds, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Dissolve to the flashback of Deke Thornton and Pike Bishop in the whorehouse where Thornton says, “Come on Pike, let’s go.” When Pike asks if Deke is “caught up,” i.e., sexually, Thornton replies, “Caught up enough to know we’ve overstayed our welcome.” Pike argues that the railroad detectives “are not going to look for us in their own backyard,” and the film cuts to Thornton in the diegetic present ,who, while at a different campfire than his old friend, shares Pike’s flashback. The flashback resumes, and Pike comforts Thornton, “Being sure is my business,” a line that then repeats on the soundtrack. Pike points his finger at Thornton as he says it, a gesture Sharon Peckinpah, describing the scene in Angel’s village, associates with her father. After Pike assures Thornton to “Relax,” however, the detectives barge in, and Deke is captured. Back in the diegetic present, Dutch notes that Pike must have really angered the railroad for them to spend so much “money Another brief flashback confirms that guilt drives Pike’s reminiscences. After the Thornton flashback, there is a scene where Sykes causes an avalanche of horses and men on a tall dune. When Tector threatens to kill the old man. Pike gives a big speech about sticking together, perhaps still thinking guiltily of how he left Thornton behind. Later on the trail, Sykes thanks Pike for the “m i^ty fine talk” and asks him how his son Clarence “Crazy” Lee performed in Starbuck. Suddenly aware that Crazy Lee was Sykes’s kid. Pike flashes back to C. L. at the massacre, and the leader is riddled with guilt that he sacrificed his old friend's son. Critics frequently note that these scenes indicate Pike’s guilt and deepen his character. 176 setting up that ambush.” Pike replies, “I caught up with them. Two or three times. There was a fellow named ‘Harrigan.’ He used to have a way of doing things. I made him change his ways. There’s a hell of a lot of people that just can’t stand to be wrong.” The joke about Lyle and Tector sharing whores “in tandem” prefaces the whore sharing in the flashback as well as the fact that the flashback itself is shared, a complex psychological move established by cutting in images of Pike and Thornton in their respective present settings as the flashback progresses. Repetition of the lines “Being sure is my business” and “Relax” further establishes the shared nature of the flashback. The fact that the flashback is shared also foregrounds its multiple meanings, since what means “guilt” for Pike over a bad leadership decision means “regret” for Thornton. Deke does not appear vindictive as he recalls his capture, but it is significant that he applauds Pike for never getting “caught,” since Thomton’s goal is indeed to catch his old friend. Thomton’s motivation is something more ambiguous than revenge; he seeks freedom through his deal with Harrigan, but by catching Pike he will also be catching “the best,” an admirable heroic task for a man otherwise coerced by the law of the railroad into playing a Judas. Deke’s failures as leader of the bounty hunters throughout the film, e.g., his failure to lead T. C. and Coffer as opposed to Pike’s eventual success with the Gorches, is significantly established in tlie flashback when Deke says to Pike, “let’s go,” a line Deke repeats throughout the film and the line with which Pike opens the bunch’s last stand. Unlike Pike Bishop’s last “Let’s go,” Deke’s order in the flashback is disobeyed by Pike, who assumes leadership. However, Pike’s refusal to follow Deke’s order in the flashback is a mistake, so the notion that Pike is “the best” is ironic from the beginning. While the dual point of view established in this flashback provides a great deal of character motivation for both Pike and Deke, it is important not to overlook the gendered nature of the whole affair. Deke’s “let’s go” is literally a plea to leave the prostitutes and hit the road, just as Pike’s later order “Let’s go” pulls the Gorches away from prostitutes for male action.38 Nevertheless, the old association of femininity with male stagnation in these scenes is accompanied by a critique of Anglo male distance from women. The sexist

The best source for a detailed discussion of male action versus female domestication in the western is still Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything (1992), and the collection Gender. Language, and Mvth (1992), edited by Glenwood Irons, is also quite good. 177 joke about tandem whores ameliorates the tension over the heist fiasco, and the laughter of the men resembles the later laughter over Teresa’s murder, both jokes hinging on misogyny. This sexist joke about tandem whores is thematically significant in two ways. First, Pike’s confession that he too should have been running whores instead of setting up the robbery reveals that Pike’s failures are not entirely tied to a feminine influence, ironically prefacing the suggestion in the flashback that women are dangerous to the wandering outlaws. Secondly, the Mexican children who share the men’s laughter, one of whom is female, are doubled by children at the campfire from which Pike will have his flashback, and the emphasis of this campfire scene is Anglo male disconnection from Mexican women and children. At the campfire. Pike watches Angel serenade the woman and children, and Lyle and Tector seem to envy Angel’s ability to coimect. As the woman and children watch Angel calmly, the hyperbole of the forced laughter over the tandem whores seems escapist by comparison, especially since the children who watch the sexist joke in the preceding scene probably do not speak English and are only laughing because the men are laughing. Likewise, the language barrier prohibits the Anglos in the bunch from understanding the lyrics to Angel’s song. Therefore, two models of relations with Mexican women and children are established, both mediated by the language barrier: (1) the Anglos find fleeting relief from internal tensions by joking about Hondo whores as innocent children watch, unaware of the nature of the joke; (2) Angel communicates lyrically with the Mexican woman and children as the Anglos envy this connection from a distance, remembering a moment of division in Pike’s past: i.e., division between Pike and Deke, between the men and the prostitutes, and between the outlaws and the railroad. The third of these divisions gives Pike a scapegoat: Harrigan. But it is clear that Pike’s speech about catching up with Harrigan, who “can’t stand to be wrong,” is really about Pike’s hubris in the flashback: “Being sure is my business.” Therefore, Pike obviously projects his own arrogant failures upon the villain Harrigan. Pike is the one who must learn to admit his failures. Most subtle in the flashback sequence is the notion of catching up. Deke struggles to catch up with Pike literally and heroically; in fact, his line “Caught up enough to know we’ve overstayed our welcome” is an attempt to assert his authority as a leader. Ironically,

178 Deke is correct in the flashback, rendering his attempt to catch up with “the best” a dubious quest. Like Deke, Pike struggles to catch up with the railroad, locating his own heroic redemption in besting Harrigan. Pike’s projection of his own guilt upon Harrigan speaks to other more troubling connections between the two men, for Pike also seeks to catch up with the railroad flnancially, and few men deserve Pike’s envy less than the evil Harrigan. Lastly, Pike and Thomton’s getting “caught up” sexually allows the detectives to catch up with them, concisely articulating the theme of female danger, but the Anglos, in a more implicit sense, long to catch up with domestic femininity in the way that they perceive Angel has. This last endeavor, like Deke’s quest for Pike’s six-shot Excalibur and Pike’s quest for Harrigan’s privilege, is deeply ironic since, as Sharrett notes, Angel is a “belligerent misogynist.” Nevertheless, this last endeavor informs the progression of characters in the film. Sociopolitically, Pike and the others must catch up with Angel’s sense of commitment, and this catching up is related to their relationships with women. Whatever Peckinpah’s opinion about Teresa’s betrayal and the danger of femininity to the hero, the flashback to Thomton’s capture balances a conventional, patriarchal image of female threat with a critique of male disconnection. Peckinpah the misogynist always struggles with Peckinpah the self-loathing man. This dual image of the feminine as danger and the masculine as sad detachment can perhaps be explained away with the Eve/Mary binary at the heart of sexist ideology. Unlike Ford’s Mv Darling Clementine (1946), however, where the Mexican Chihuahua is aptly named as the Eve-bitch and Caucasian Clementine the virginal Mary, Peckinpah temporarily reverses the racial polarity of the opposition. The Mexican audience of Angel’s serenade is the maternal and virginal opposed to the white whores in the flashback. Of course, Peckinpah’s vision is no less essentialist than Ford’s, substituting an idealized image of the Mexican woman for a demonized image. But to his credit Peckinpah obsesses over the failures of the men, especially Pike, as they misconnect with women, an obsession most thoroughly explored in the flashback to Aurora’s death. Like the Thornton flashback, the Aurora flashback hinges on Pike’s guilt. On the trail after meeting with Mapache, Pike tells Dutch the story of the Mexican woman he “wanted to marry.” In the flashback, he comes through the door bearing gifts and is

179 promptly slapped by Aurora. The joke of the henpecked husband is obvious, but beneath it lies male self-doubt. Simons writes: “It is Aurora’s dignity versus Pike’s buffoonery which gives the scene its dramatic edge, for she has far more at stake than Pike Bishop. She is, in addition, worried about her husband, who she fears will try to come back and do harm to both her and Pike” (93). Pike’s “buffoonery” belittles his manhood, which makes the joke that he misses Aurora more rich and partly confirms Simons’s suspicion that when a man as experienced as Pike puts his lover in danger “he is expressing an unconscious conflict within his nature.” Simon’s argument implies that Pike unconsciously allows Aurora to be killed by her husband out of fear of his feminine side. It follows then, according to Simons’s reasoning, that we first see the husband enter the room to kill Aurora in her mirror because man seeks to destroy the feminine in himself. Simons’s is an astute reading, certainly descriptive of almost every movie by Stanley Kubrick, Peckinpah’s contemporary, and descriptive of male adventure formulae in general. However, the Aurora scene is about more than Pike’s fear of the feminine. More obviously, the scene is about Pike’s construction of Aurora at the expense of his responsibilities to her. Before the husband appears in Aurora’s mirror to shoot her, she stands in front of it bare-chested as if to admire herself, but she stares away from the mirror at Pike, posing and smiling for her lover. Aurora’s point of view is tied to her self-image through the inclusion of the mirror in the mise en scene, but her self-image is tied directly to Pike’s point of view as she poses for him. Her staring at Pike from in front of the mirror suggests, not the returned gaze, but that Pike is her actual mirror, the looking glass in which she sees herself. Since the entire flashback is filtered through Pike’s memory, this image of Aurora may be idealized. But the “self-doubt” of Pike’s recollection is more than a romanticized vision o f love mixed with a fear of feminine stasis. It is most obviously another instance where Pike’s assumptions about his heroic virility as a leader lead to violence against someone close to him. The husband coming through the door resembles the detectives coming for Thornton in the earlier flashback, and the husband’s entrance also

180 recalls Pike’s emasculated entrance at the begirming of the Aurora flashback. That both the detectives and the husband best Pike while he is “catching up” with women speaks to Pike’s larger aspirations to catch up with the railroad and men who have women. Simons notes that Pike’s scarred leg is a sexual symbol of Pike’s confusion between love and violence, and he locates this violence in Pike’s fear of the feminine in himself, reflected by the possibility of domestic stasis as embodied in Aurora (106). But Aurora is something more than a reflector of Pike. Aurora is not Pike’s mirror; rather. Pike is Aurora’s mirror. Admittedly, the danger of the feminine is here insofar as men are wounded when they stop for women, and Simons is astute to note this phenomenon. In the outlaw and gunfighter tradition Jesse James’s murder by Bob Ford while straightening a picture, Billy the Kid’s murder by Pat Garrett while visiting a lover, and, to a lesser degree. Wild Bill Hickok’s murder by Jack McCall while sitting all reveal the danger posed to the hero by domestic stasis, but they also reveal the intmsion of violence into the home or town space, the curse of the violent wanderer upon the domestic. In The Wild Bunch the Aurora flashback represents transient-masculine danger at least as much as domestic- feminine danger. Aurora’s death is Pike’s conquest of her self-image, not his fear of the feminine in his own self-image. This is why ± e husband in the mirror shoots Aurora and not Pike. And this is why the mirror image of the husband, and not Aurora, is the image of danger in the scene. The flashbacks in The Wild Bunch are really about ownership. In the first, prostitutes in the railroad’s “own backyard” are central to the outlaws’ catching up to the railroad, and the railroad’s catching up to them. The danger is located not solely in the women themselves but also in the heroes’ coveting railroad property, of entering the railroad’s “backyard.” In the Aurora flashback the woman becomes currency in backdoor man Pike’s bid for the domestic, her own identity conquered by Pike’s point of view the very instant before she, like Teresa, is murdered. All of this, of course, has to do with Pike’s self-image, but the emphasis is upon the conquest nature of Pike’s goals to obtain a railroad’s money and another man’s wife and the inclination of those around him to identify their own self-image with Pike’s. Thornton attempts to catch up with Pike heroically. Aurora defines herself through Pike’s eyes, an obvious concession after she 181 slaps Pike at the beginning of the flashback for failing to recognize her needs. Lastly, Dutch Engstrom, the implied listener in Pike’s first flashback and the actual listener in Pike’s Aurora flashback, is the ultimate dupe. After the Thornton flashback. Pike buries his guilt over the leadership error in a vow to catch up with the railroad one more time. Dutch follows: ‘T wouldn’t have it any other way either.” In direct contradiction to the advice implied by the Thornton flashback, Dutch agrees to enter the railroad’s backyard for Pike. As Pike rides with Dutch, remembering the Aurora incident, Peckinpah and Ballard cleverly shoot the duo with a long lens through high weeds. The telephoto lens flattens the depth of field and, combined with the fact that the camera is moving, gives the ride the exaggerated quality of shaking. Along with the obstruction of the weeds, the possibilities of this cinematic distortion are many: (1) Pike’s image of the past is indistinct; (2) Pike’s present ride is roughly exaggerated by his past heroic failures, periiaps even limping; (3) Pike’s present mission is tainted by motives in conflict with his actual sympathies for Angel’s village. The third of these possibilities is most interesting because it actually includes the other two, and all three possibilities draw Dutch, who rides beside Pike in the shot, into Pike’s obsessive motives. These explanations also account for other changes in cinematographic style that occur after the deal is struck with Mapache. The second half of the film is increasingly marked by zoom and telephoto photography, both of which emphasize danger through indistinct and desperate point-of-view shots as the bunch and their pursuers evade Mapache’s army. Villa’s allies, the U. S. army, and the attacks of each other. While this visual distortion increases the sense of action it also pulls the bunch farther away from the idyllic tranquility of Angel’s vision, where moving camera seems to waltz with the lazy trees and calm river water.^^

It is essential that Aurora is Mexican, because she stands for the larger feminine ideal of Angel’s Mexican village, an ideal also noted by Simons. But Pike’s desire for Aurora, like his desire for Mexico, is more oriented toward conquest than revolutionary

Earlier in the film, the avalanche o f horses and men and Pike’s struggle to pull his wounded leg over the saddle is juxtaposed with stylized, slow-motion shots of Thomton’s band giving chase. Since Thomton’s men are largely incompetent, this juxtaposition lends more irony to Thomton’s and others’ images of Pike as “the best.” 182 rebirth and liberation. From the moment the bunch crosses the Rio Grande, there is a suggestion that Angel’s Mexico, through its beauty, is feminine and a related emphasis on the sexual nature of imperialism. The greenery across the Rio Grande stands in stark contrast to the sandy brown of Starbuck, confirming Angel’s point of view as he proclaims, “Mexico lindo.” To Angel Mexico is “pretty”; to Lyle and Tector, however, Mexico is something to be colonized: Lyle: “I don’t see nothing so lindo about it” Tector “Just looks like more of Texas far as I’m concerned.” Angel: “You have no eyes.” Angel’s accusation that the Gorches have no eyes refers symbolically to their lack of visionary zeal for Mexico and, later, the revolution. Angel is the one who spots the riflemen on the roof in Starbuck, gingerly avoids the avalanche of horses, and later notices that Dutch is falling off the train during the robbery of guns for Mapache, saving Dutch’s life. He literally spots things better than the others and symbolically sees Mexico according to revolutionary and patriotic ideals as well. Also, he draws the vision of the woman and children with his serenade in ways that the Anglos cannot understand, as Pike and Dutch hide in visions of Pike’s past, and the Gorches envy Angel’s serenade from behind an invisible cultural border. At the Rio Grande, Lyle and Tector merge as two voices completing one imperialistic thought: “more of Texas.” The brothers who fornicate in tandem colonize in tandem, and the two activities are very similar in Peckinpah’s film. Riding into the outskirts of Angel’s village the bunch encounters a starving dog, which recalls a dog outside the French garrison in Major Dundee and the imperialistic nature of both films’ raided villages. One of the bunch calls the strafed terrain, “Mapache territory,” and the territorial imperative bonds Mapache with the Gorches, who claim to have robbed Starbuck as an “opening for a new territory.” The fictional Mapache is also explicitly tied to the historical enemy of Villa’s revolution when Dutch notes, “Huerta scraped it clean.” But as the bunch crosses the threshold from the blight of “Mapache territory” on the outskirts to the vegetative oasis of Angel’s village, the imperialistic imperative finds gendered terms. Angel warns, “Any disrespect to my family or my people I will kill you”:

183 Tector (referring to Angel’s sister): ‘T d be proud to make her acquaintance.” Lyle: “And that of your mama too. Sonny.” Lyle and Tector make sexual references to Angel’s sister, mother, and even grandmother, before the film cuts to a girl hiding behind a wall, confirming implications of invasion and rape inherent in the Gorches’ joke. Peckinpah probably borrowed this image of hidden women from John Sturges’s Magnificent Seven (1960) or its source Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). In both films mercenary heroes are hired by villagers to fight powerful aggressors, and in both films the village fears the mercenaries it has hired so much that the young women are hidden in the woods. The reference to the girl behind the wall is an allusion and a symbol of male danger, but women are in fact abundant in Angel’s village: Women and children abound, there is plentiful food and drink, and later in the evening a fiesta, with music and drink and dancing, is celebrated for the gang. Meanwhile, giggling girls draw water from a well with the aid of the amazingly courteous Gorches ^ y le is wanted for murder and rape!), as naked boys swim and dive happily in a pond... Later on, the tamed Gorches play a children’s game, cat’s cradle, with the senoritas. (Simons 95) Simons captures both the feminine nature of the village and its ability to summon the innocence of childhood. Observing the Gorches, Don José tells Pike, “We all dream of being a child again. Even the worst of us,” articulating the overwhelming sense of renewal and rebirth that the village offers. It becomes clear that these idealized country people are the right side in the revolution. In narrative terms, the idealized village—feminine, domestic, regenerative—is part of the bunch’s eventual transformation to sociopolitical commitment. Even though they betray Angel’s village in Àgua Verde, this betrayal is an implicit source of Dutch’s frustration when he eventually screams at Pike that a man’s word “ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to!” Nevertheless, this surface idealism about rebirth, like all idealism in the film, is tempered with irony. First, children in The Wild Bunch are hardly innocent. The children torturing the scorpion in the opening sequence attest to this. Secondly, children are hardly safe from the bunch. In Starbuck two Caucasian children embrace in the middle of the massacre, watching a horseman spin balletically as he is tom apart by bullets. More significantly, two Mexican children watch the same violence from behind a comer. They are literally at the margins of Starbuck, which illustrates the town’s colonial history and

184 racial inequities. Moreover, the Mexican children in Starbuck are doubled by the girl at the margins of Angel’s village, hiding from the outlaws. The possibility of violence against children is always implicit in the film, if never shown, and the girl behind the wall clarifies the sexual nature of this violence. Lyle and Teeter’s game of cat’s cradle, with Angel’s sister no less, attests to this potential for sexual violence as well, since this is a child’s game with implications of repeated penetration. Lyle and Tector laugh “innocently” with Angel’s sister over the game, renewing themselves even as they seem to make good on their promise to become “acquainted” with the women in Angel’s family. Later, during a village dance, Lyle laughs, “Hey Tector, let’s swap,” and although the dancing seems irmocent the comment recalls the story of whores in tandem. Dutch dances with a girl who at first seems attached to Pike, which continues the theme of sharing, and Sykes gleefully warns, “I’m gonna steal his girl” as children laugh and clap merrily. But the notion of sharing has dangerous implications in The Wild Bunch, and the possibility that the bunch will “steal” the village’s girls is never far from the euphoria of the moment. As the bunch leaves Angel’s village, they are serenaded to the song “La Golondrina,” which Simons describes as “(‘The Swallow’), a lonely wanderer’s song of love for and separation from his native land” (96-97). Simons interprets the exit as a warrior’s paradox, akin to his reading of warring masculine and feminine impulses in the heroes: in order to sustain (both in the world and in our imaginations) Edenic retreats (like the village), havens from history’s nightmare, we must contrastingly fight for them, violate their underlying feminine or maternal principles of home, of family, of community so that, conversely, those principles may be preserved. (97) This, I agree, is a paradox at the center of adventure genres and accounts for the tensions of the western hero, always between community order and violent chaos, wherein the violence both sustains and threatens the community. When applied to The Wild Bunch. however, such a reading says too little about cultural difference. The community and its generous serenade informs the bunch’s potential for commitment by furnishing a “Mexico lindo” of femininity and childlike innocence with which they can identify, but Agua Verde offers money, which, as Pike later notes, “cuts an awful lot of family ties.” On the one hand, the village’s combination of femininity, childlike innocence, and Mexico, all three

185 idealized, offers the bunch a chance to redeem themselves of past faults by becoming revolutionary heroes. On the other hand, the village is implicitly made into just another whorehouse for the men to visit on their way to Mapache’s money insofar as their moment of profound connection is made fleeting by Pike’s mission to visit the enemy at Agua Verde. Beginning with the village scene, three particular trajectories of male character development around women and Mexico become important The first, which I have already discussed, concludes with Angel’s murder of Teresa almost immediately after the bunch arrives in Agua Verde. The second and third, however, progress through the film’s last battle and round out the film’s themes of gender and Mexico as these themes relate to the sociopolitical commitment and evasion of the heroes. The second of these trajectories involves Lyle’s sudden attachment to Mexican women and his increasingly Mexican attire of a sombrero and a poncho. The third involves Pike’s sexual relationship with two women from Agua Verde, one a physical relationship and the other a symbolic resolution of the Aurora flashback. As the bunch are serenaded during their departure from the village, Angel’s sister gives the poncho-wearing Lyle a sombrero, hinting that Lyle may be able to empathize with the plight of the villagers through his interest in a woman. Peckinpah used actor Warren Oates to similar ends in Major Dundee, where Oates, while presented as stereotypical Peckinpah “trash,” is the only white Southerner other than the officer Tyreen to experience a moment of reconciliation with the African American troops. This moment of reconciliation is limited, however, by black soldier Aesop’s assimilationist deferral to his Southemness over his blackness, and Oates’s transformation is finally limited in The Wild Bunch as well. Lyle wears his sombrero and poncho to Agua Verde, where he and Tector get drank with prostitutes. The Gorches and the women skip and frolic like children amongst casks of alcohol. Lyle drunkenly shares with Tector a history lesson he has learned from one of the prostitutes: “The dons of Spain built this over 300 years ago.” Tector responds, “Well, I’ll tell you Lyle, I’m all for them dons,” and the men fire their pistols into the casks, pulling the nearly topless prostitutes into the falling liquor. The scene is jubilant to the point of total childishness while revealing other transformations in 186 Lyle’s character previously, he has not seemed the type to care about Mexican history. Like scenes in Angel’s village, the cask scene fuses childlike rebirth with sexualized relationships between the Gorches and Mexican women. Nonetheless, the image of rebirth is a perversion of both maternity and baptism, as the Gorches grope at the breasts of the prostitutes and the whole parQr showers themselves in alcohol. Moreover, the implication of imperialism attending the Gorches' Rio Grande crossing returns in the cask scene with Tector’s line, ‘Tm all for them dons.” The Gorches and the women eventually play in a giant tub where the Gorches clumsily poke the nipples of the women as Lyle yells, “Hey Tector, look at them beauties.” “Mexico lindo” moves quickly from the idealism of Angel’s village to fleeting inebriation, and, when Lyle aimounces to the rest of the bunch, “Boys, I want you to meet my fiancee,” his conversion to a Mexican identity is tainted by his staggering drunkeimess. Interestingly, Lyle’s Mexican attire and supposed future bride correspond to his isolation from the rest of the group. Sykes jokes about having Lyle’s fiancee, and Lyle becomes guarded as the others laugh. The joke recalls Angel’s protection of the women of his village, but Angel himself is no longer interested in women. His pressing concern is that he get one case of rifles and ammunition for his people when the bunch robs the train for Mapache. Therefore, just as Lyle’s experiences with women suggest a superficial and even imperialistic identification with Mexico, Angel begins to separate the feminine ideal from the revolution. This separation of the Mexican feminine from the revolutionary is reiterated after the train robbery when Indians fighting with Villa come for the case of guns. Lyle, still dorming the Mexican garb given to him in Angel’s sister, is offended that the revolutionaries have so easily infiltrated their lines and, in a moment of humiliation over the Indians’ sudden appearance, is the only member of the bunch not impressed with their prowess.'^ Therefore, Lyle’s taking a Mexican bride actually seems inversely proportionate to the bunch’s enthusiasm for the revolution. By the time the bunch returns

This scene also occasions a fight between Lyle and Tector over the Indians’ easy approach. In a previous scene, the bunch empties a bottle, playing keep-away from Lyle. The joke establishes the growing unity of the bunch by having Tector participate in the game, perhaps the only time in the movie that Tector does not share with his brother. Tector’s fight with Lyle over the Indians coming for the guns and Tector’s joining in the others’ game of keep-away both show his growing alliance with Pike, Dutch, Angel, and Sykes at the expense of his more isolationist relationship with his brother. 187 to Agua Verde and Mapache’s prostitutes at the end of the film, Lyle and Tector are back to sharing whores in tandem: Lyle barks at the prostitute, “You said, ‘Dos for two.’” When the bunch makes its final march to demand Angel, on its surface a gesture of commitment to Angel’s revolutionary ideals, Lyle no longer wears his sombrero and poncho, and one of the first people Lyle shoots in the film’s final battle is a woman. At heart, Lyle is a tourist and a whore monger, and the hope that he might empathize with the Mexicans or, correspondingly, with the Mexican women is dashed by the film’s final bloody massacre. The bunch approaches deeper sympathy with the revolution as Lyle becomes the most isolated member and the member most associated with Mexican femininity, which confirms the film’s dual use of femininity all along: (1) the feminine impedes male action even as it inspires it; (2) the ideal of the feminine inspires potential cormections with the Mexican people, but Lyle fails to engage in a Mexican romance as anything other than conquest. Lyle’s growing identification with Mexico after encountering Angel’s sister and his “fiancee” at Agua Verde seems to do little for his actual commitment to the revolution. Part of this inverse relationship between the feminine and the revolutionary lies in an old sexism at the heart of the film’s equation of Mexican femininity with revolutionary ideals. The idealized feminine offers a reason for revolution but the feminine is finally incompatible with action. Another explanation of the inverse relationship lies in the film’s backhanded revisionism, wherein the idealized woman, e.g., Teresa, is demystified and replaced not with a real woman but rather with woman as counterrevolutionary slut. What deepens Peckinpah’s otherwise typically sexist politics, however, is the suggestion that Lyle’s identification with Mexico and its women is never anything more than conquest and, therefore, counterrevolutionary to begin with. Even Lyle’s final agreement to join Pike in battle is more existential than political, as he answers, “Why not?” But then Pike’s “Let’s go,” the order to which Lyle replies, is politically ambiguous as well. Finally, the trajectory of Lyle’s transformation to Mexican identity through the feminine is mirrored in Pike’s own trajectory. Pike’s gendered character transformations are more well defined than Lyle’s, but they are no less shallow.

188 Pike’s transformation to commitment is inseparable from the tensions described in the flashbacks, particularly the Aurora flashback. Critics have noted that the Aurora flashback establishes patterns of guilt and regret in Pike’s character. The key to the Aurora flashback, however, is neither solely guilt over his letting her die nor solely regret over losing her love, though this guilt and regret are part of it Rather, what connects the Aurora flashback to the Thornton flashback and to relationships between Pike and women in the second part of the film is Pike’s struggle to have that which does not belong to him. This is a film about thieves. Pike’s greed for money is foregrounded as a character flaw inconsistent with the revolution, a flaw Pike may seek to resolve in the last battle, so one might argue that the transformation in Pike’s character is from self-interested thief to good outlaw. However, Peckinpah was suspicious of the Robin Hood image of good outlawry, and there is plenty in Pike’s relationships with Mexican women at the end of the film to suggest that Pike’s transformation is only a surface transformation. Upon entering Agua Verde for the first time. Pike has a moment of brief but telling eye contact with a young woman who slightly resembles Angel’s sister. Agua Verde is immediately presented as the inverse of Angel’s village, a dystopian Mexico where children are viewed through bars and a woman breast-feeds through bandoleers. Pike’s eye contact with the young woman seems an idyllic moment of connection in an otherwise martial wasteland, but the character of the young woman is not fully revealed until later in the film when she becomes the prostitute with whom Pike seeks solace from his guilt over Angel. This scene with the prostitutes which occasions Pike’s final “Let’s go” is short but important. Pike and the young woman exchange looks, a moment of nonverbal communication that is poignant but ambiguous, as he dresses and she washes her neck and breasts. Christopher Sharrett claims, “Pike’s moment of grim self-appraisal/revulsion seems to affirm Angel’s idealism and zeal as Pike recognizes the young prostitute’s moral superiority to him” (100). Sharrett admits that Pike’s recognition of her “moral superiority” is restrained by sexual violence, for Lyle and Tector argue with their prostitute in the next room, but it is no less possible that Pike sees in the girl someone he should be fighting with instead of hiding with. When Pike looks at the young girl’s child crying in

189 the comer, the camera zooming in slightly, Simons notes Pike’s own subjective drawing into the child’s world, his rebirth (100-101). Simons, therefore, reads Pike’s departure from the prostitutes as a rebirth into responsibility for Angel. The far darker and more plausible thematic implication of Pike’s experience in the prostitute’s room, however, lies in the theme of ownership surrounding Pike’s interests throughout the film. Perhaps the baby is a child of the revolution. More interesting to me is that the child affirms that this woman, so obviously photographed as “for Pike” when he first enters Agua Verde, has been with another man. Her body position as she washes mimics Aurora’s before the mirror in the flashback. Aurora’s stare is for Pike, but she is married. The young prostitute’s stare, however, is more sad, smiling submissively for Pike but clearly aware of something other than their love-making. Indirectly, she is Mapache’s woman, and Pike is in the same position as with Harrigan: another man’s backyard. The similarities between Mapache and Harrigan are many: their brutality, their martial law, their apparent ownership of everything but responsibility. When the bunch steals guns from the railroad, they disconnect the passenger car occupied by soldiers and Thomton’s bounty hunters and drive the train to a safe distance up the track where they unload the weapons. Then, Pike sends the train backwards again, and it eventually collides violently with the passenger car they left behind. Later, Mapache’s train waits at a telegraph station for news of the robbery, barely holding off Villa’s army. Discovering that the guns have been successfully stolen, Mapache boards the train for Agua Verde, but his retreat is only temporary. In fact, as the bunch sends Harrigan’s train of progress backwards, Mapache’s moves forwards, and the symbolic transaction is complete. Pike has defeated the railroad but at the cost of empowering Mapache. As Mapache’s train races off. Villa himself seems to linger on horseback in the distance; the bunch has, by association with Mapache, left Villa behind.'^* Furthermore, the bunch’s separation of the passenger car articulates their abandonment of their own country’s laws, but their outlawry

During the bunch’s escape from Starbuck, Pike looks over his shoulder to see a man in the distance, lingering behind. The man is not identihed but seems to symbolize all that Pike has left behind, not only in Starbuck but in life. Pike’s agreement to arm Mapache puts Villa in the category of people left behind.

190 is hardly revolutionary. The train robbed by the bunch is mostly guarded by “green recruits,” smiling soldiers who are little more than boys, and in the corresponding scene of Mapache’s train a young boy in military dress proudly salutes his leader. Then, during the final battle Pike is shot by another child in military dress. It seems that as the bunch leaves their own country’s children behind they nonetheless fail to build a new family south of the border. Children continue to figure into the transformation of the bunch in ways that exclude them from any coimection to the Mexican people. The prostitute’s child and Mapache’s boy soldiers are initiates Pike will never have, while the boys on the train and Crazy Lee are initiates he left behind. As important as the boy who salutes Mapache, however, is Yolonda, a singer on Mapache’s train who provide’s his soundtrack for the fight with Villa. She is also the woman who shoots Pike in the back in the final battle, and, therefore, figures prominently in the film’s treatment of female characters and femininity. Unfortunately, Yolonda, like most of the female characters in the film, is never actually named in the movie.'*^ Also, like most of the female characters in the film, Yolonda was nearly a casualty on the cutting room floor. Stephen Prince describes Yolonda in his introduction to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch H999): Peckinpah had shot a ton of footage, and the requisite trimming of this material, unfortunately, made some of the subsidiary characters less defined and coherent. For example, the woman who shoots Pike in the back does so because of her close relationship with Mapache, a relationship Peckinpah tried to convey at various points in the film. Peckinpah wamed Feldman that the editing of the scene where Mapache’s forces are attacked by Villa was in danger of muddying the relationship between Mapache and Yolonda. (13) Villa’s attack was one of the scenes cut and then reinserted for the director’s cut, but even in its present form it fails to make clear that Yolonda is Mapache’s woman. It does, however, preface the bunch’s final battle by reintroducing the serenade as a political device. The bunch is serenaded with “La Golondrina” as they leave Angel’s village, and

42 The final credits for The Wild Bunch list no such character, though there is a character Yolis, played by Yolanda Ponce. I have maintained the name “Yolonda” because both Stephen Prince and Peckinpah use the name to describe the character of the singer who shoots Pike. 191 Mapache too is serenaded by Yolonda on the train. Therefore, Yolonda is not only Mapache’s woman, but she is his political singer, no small job given the centrality of song to war. At the end of the film, during the bunch’s final march to demand Angel from Mapache, “La Golondrina” reprises on the soundtrack. As the men walk toward their demise the song plays, and suddenly a group of drunken singers appear against a wall. The song appears at first to be for the bunch, an aural flashback to the exit from Angel’s village and, therefore, an indicator of their newborn commitment to Angel’s cause. But the sudden awareness that the song is not a flashback but rather a diegedc feature of the last scene problematizes any association of the song with rebirth. In fact, these are Mapache’s singers, not Pike’s. One way to read the revelation that the singers are actually in the frame is that Pike’s bunch has taken Mapache’s song. Another way to read this revelation is that the romantic notion of rebirth of the bunch as Mexican revolutionaries is undermined by the fact that they are identified with Angel’s village and Mapache simultaneously. These two readings are not incompatible, for the bunch have stolen Mapache’s song and are tainted by it. Over “La Golondrina” Jerry Fielding cleverly dubs military drumming, recalling the bunch’s entrance into Starbuck. The drununing eventually overwhelms “La Golondrina,” just as the violence of the scene overwhelms whatever revolutionary idealism informs it. Soon the bunch stands surrounded by Mapache’s men, they demand Angel, Mapache slits Angel’s throat. Pike kills Mapache, and there is a brief moment of shock and confusion before Pike kills Mohr and the war is on. The final battle of The Wild Bunch is a remarkably detailed piece of editing, and my reading of the film does not necessitate the sort of shot-by-shot description of the entire sequence that would make holistic sense of this important scene. Features of the battle, however, are of particular interest to the scene’s treatment of gender. For example, Lyle’s third kill, as I have noted, is a woman. Even before Lyle actually shoots a woman, however, women and children figure significantly into the shot sequence. Almost immediately after the fighting starts, a quick shot shows women and children watching the battle from under a table, which is then turned over by a falling soldier. The turning of the table against the bunch’s fire immediately debunks the bunch’s status as saviors. As Lyle

192 shoots a soldier, another shot shows a different woman pulling a baby tightly into her breast to protect it. Such moments quickly separate the bunch's actions from the very notion of revolutionary commitment these actions, at a superficial level, seem to imply. After shooting the woman, Lyle shoots through a door at soldiers, but the film cuts instantly back to the woman under the table protecting the child, which suggests Lyle’s continued symbolic threat to the Mexican woman and child. Other shots actually imply members of the bunch are shooting at each other. For example, in one series of shots (1) a soldier shoots firom an arch, (2) Lyle shoots from a doorway, (3) Dutch falls, (4) another soldier falls. While it is clear that Lyle has not really shot Dutch, the visual equation of Lyle with the Mexican soldier in the arch exemplifies the self-consuming nature of the violence in the scene. Parallel editing is used to illustrate the simultaneity of action, but this editing also maps relationships, like those between Lyle and women, in brief snippets of intense violence. Point of view shifts erratically, as when the overturned table both protects the women and children from the violence and also obscures their vision of the battle, and, at one point, Thornton’s point of view suddenly intrudes from a rock cliff far away. Through his binoculars the violence is quieter, but the isolation of distance only makes it more unsettling given Thomton’s earlier comment to the bounty hunters, “I wish to God I was with them.” Most crucial to the gender politics of the battle, however, is a brief domestic intrusion in which Pike rounds a comer as the film cuts suddenly to a close-up of Yolonda. The shot of Yolonda’s face at first seems like a continuity error, and ± e cold blue color of the shot stands in contrast to the overwhelming colors of dirt and blood in the battle at large. Then the camera zooms out, and Yolonda’s image is revealed to be inside a mirror. Pike is in her room and back in the Aurora flashback, complete with woman and mirror. But this time the woman is not looking at Pike, and he traces her point of view to the door on his right, on which the mirror hangs. The door moves. Pike fires through the mirror, and a soldier stumbles from behind, dead. Then Pike tums inexplicably to his left and fires, not at Yolonda but at the left side of the screen. What is he firing at? The next shot answers the question but only in figurative terms, for as Pike shoots the film cuts to Thornton on the ridge sick of watching and suddenly exiting the left side of the screen as if

193 magically hit by Pike’s blast. There is more fighting outside as Dutch throws a grenade into a room, which at first appears to be the room Pike is in, and a woman who Dutch will use as a hostage moments later cowers under a table. Then back to Pike, turning to reload as Yolonda shoots him through the back. He tums on her and fires, yelling: “Bitch!” This sequence of shots is a spectacle of gendered violence. Without the flashbacks it is little more than some grisly misogyny inserted into an action sequence. With the flashbacks, however, the Yolonda sequence is the forced resolution of conflicts at the heart of Pike’s character. Simons reads Pike’s shooting the mirror as “firing at his own image,” but Pike’s image is never in the mirror (104). Simons is I think accurate in noting that through a complicated “psychological displacement” Pike has taken the place of the husband who shot Aurora. However, what is most remarkable to me is that it is the image of the woman looking away from Pike that dominates the looking glass, and Pike’s firing at the mirror not only kills her supposed lover but destroys the image that, unlike Aurora and the young prostitute, is clearly not making eye contact and not for him at any level. She is with the man behind the door, and if Pike resembles the violent husband this is finally not his home. He is an intruder. Peckinpah’s comment to Phil Feldman, quoted by Prince, that Yolonda shoots Pike in the back because she is Mapache’s woman complicates the problem further (14). Just as Pike’s march steals Mapache’s music, the intmsion into the room threatens Mapache’s singer. The suggestion in the editing that Pike is firing at Thornton articulates that the scene addresses Pike’s frustration over his failure to save his friend, and guilt over Aurora’s death is temporarily resolved in the moment of violence as well. But whatever fleeting resolution the sequence provides it makes clearer than almost any other scene that there is a feminine image that Pike will never own. The sexual frustration at the heart of The Wild Bunch makes this most phallocentric of films remarkably dependent upon women, which should not be surprising since the women in the film function as symbols more than as developed characters. Before the final battle, as Lyle and Tector bicker with their prostitute, Tector tortures a bird by tying it to a string, an image Simons notes recalls both “La Golondrina” (“The Swallow”) and the game of cat’s cradle with Angel’s sister. Peckinpah’s concise symbolic use of the tethered bird to symbolize the bunch’s entrapment of Mexico’s music and women implies a great deal of

194 self-consciousness about the conquest inherent in these thieves’s mission. To say that Pike struggles to resolve his past failures with Thornton and Aurora in a moment of intense sexual violence during the last battle certainly is not to say that Peckinpah believes this resolution is possible or positive, for the film consistently illustrates that the bunch’s engagements with the Mexican-feminine ideal are selfish and destmctive, even during their supposed last moment of revolutionary commitment. Moreover, Pike’s totalitarian heroic leadership destroys lives not only in the flashbacks but in the present as well. This is especially true of Dutch Engstrom, who follows Pike religiously, abandoning Angel to Mapache along the way and dying with Pike in an orgasmic final moment where he uses his last breaths to cry, “Pike! Pike! Pike!” It is significant that one of the men who fires the final shots into Dutch is not dressed as a soldier but rather in a large sombrero like Don Jose’s in Angel’s village, for if Dutch’s speech about a man’s word helps motivate the last battle this battle has a lot more to do with Pike’s all-consuming needs than with revolution. The Wild Bunch ends with Thornton joining Sykes and Don José to fight in the revolution, and the film flashes back to the exit from Angel’s village for a last ditch effort at idealism. However, after the credits role, the image of the bunch’s exit literally shrinks and is replaced by an image lacking focus. The Wild Bunch says as much about heroic commitment all along, revealing, on the one hand, the possibility of the bunch’s commitment to revolution and, on the other, the selfishness with which they avoid it, even in death. Peckinpah himself justified the necessity of violence for revolutionary means, but conversely held an image of Mexico that was escapist as well. As I note in Chapter Four, Peckinpah said in 1972, Here in this country, everybody is worried about stopping the war and saving the forests and all that, but these same crusaders go out die door in the morning forgetting to kiss their wives and water the flowers. In Mexico they don’t worry so goddamn much about saving the human race or about the wheeling and dealing tiiat’s killing us. (qtd. in Miller 4) And yet Peckinpah’s images of Mexico in Major Dundee and The Wild Bunch focus specifically on revolution and the tension between heroic selfishness and sociopolitical commitment. Likewise, both movies, while failing to imagine fully developed female characters, agonize over men failing women, and seem acutely aware that the revolutionary inspiration men draw from the feminine ideal is selfish and corrupt. Peckinpah’s 195 imagining Mexico as a space of domestic bliss where men “kiss their wives and water the flowers” instead of worrying “so goddamn much about saving the human race” has almost nothing to do with what actually happens in The Wild Bunch, where men kill their wives and some worry a great deal about saving the human race. Despite his interest in Arthur Perm’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Peckinpah will never be kin to the well-meaning, liberal directors of his era: Perm, Martin Ritt, Norman Jewison. Nor will he belong in the conservative ranks with John Wayne. Rather, Peckinpah fits, if anywhere, with sensationalist iconoclasts like Sam Fuller and the politically baffling likes of Don Siegel and John Huston. Peckinpah’s avoidance of an absolutely clear political position, however, does not make him an apolitical director. Quite the opposite is true, for Peckinpah’s films are very much about politics but in ways so devoted to questioning the motives of heroic action that the process of generic and personal self-reflection supersedes any clear political direction. Peckinpah, according to Paul Seydor (1995), wanted to be remembered as someone who “never stopped searching,” no doubt prompting Seydor’s description of the director and his movies as about “man trying to get to the most decent places in himself’ (18). I would argue, however, that Peckinpah wanted to wallow in the least decent places in himself. His films are neither demystifications of the western nor, as John Cawelti (1978) and Rita Parks (1982) have claimed, reaffirmations of myth (Cawelti 509, Parks 115). Rather, they are a self-styled western hero’s reflexive explorations of the western hero, and they repeatedly rework the moment when the hero’s commitment to a cause is rendered ironic and shallow. Therefore, by revealing the ironies underlying heroic commitment, Peckinpah’s films are not politically radical so much as they are a constant attempt to evade discovering new possibilities for the western by devoting the greatest textual energy to the subject of heroic evasion itself. Peckinpah’s films were not responsive to feminism with sympathy or backlash so much as they foregrounded the crisis of men, particularly white men, in changing times. And for all the ink that has been spilled over Peckinpah’s heroes’ loathing of a progress defined as modem capitalism, militarism, and technocracy, these heroes’ covetousness of

196 what is owned by the Harrigans and the Mapaches taints their chances of ever finding something larger and more revolutionary. As a final word on Peckinpah himself, I return to Weddle’s biography: Sam himself was deeply ambivalent about the violence he portrayed and the violence within himself. Compelled by his romantic concept of masculinity to provoke barroom brawls with stuntmen, he was also mortified and racked with guilt when his drunken rages scalded loved ones—Marie [first wife]. Begonia [second wife], his kids. He knew he wasn’t alone with Viemam, Watts, and other American cities going up in flames. The whole blood-drenched history and mythology of America graphically illustrated that his personal straggles were a microcosm of those tearing his country apart at the seams. (334)

Periiaps Peckinpah understood the limitations of heroism quite personally and how these limitations related to a time of intense uncertainty. But Peckinpah’s revisions of the western hero are like promises the morning after a terrible drank. These promises are both bom from self-criticism and stillbom from self-criticism. His gift as a director lies in the creation of flawed heroes who are given the opportunity to do something revolutionary for the right reasons. His own artistic battle of Agua Verde lies in the fact that these heroes always choose their personal demons over revolution. In terms of a larger sociopolitical picture The Wild Bunch is about Anglo warriors dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century and about a 1960s director dragged kicking and screaming into an era of sociopolitical progress. Peckinpah’s film shows an obvious awareness that the old patriarchs of militarism (i.e., Mapache) and capitalist avarice (i.e., Harrigan) are far more criminal than those outside the law, but the film’s heroes themselves are driven to revolutionary action by avarice. To read The Wild Bunch solely as an allegory of Viemam is to miss its broader applications. The reluctant heroes of The Wild Bunch know that the revolution is right the minute they enter Angel’s village, but old habits die very hard in Peckinpah’s films. And old habits died very hard for Peckinpah and a number of white men of his generation. Many of these men were disturbed by the legacies of American racism, classism, and sexism, all of which came to fruition in the “violent protests” of kids, in which Peckinpah purported to believe (qtd. in Farber 41). But many of these men were no doubt also uncertain about what these “violent protests” might eventually accomplish. The reluctant western hero as white, male outlaw sympathetic with revolution but tainted by self-preservation afforded Peckinpah the perfect 197 image for exploring old habits and new possibilities. Peckinpah could critique this hero’s motives, a generic critique reflecting a larger social critique, but Peckinpah could not imagine more progressive heroes partly because he represented a generation of men who, even when sold on the need for revolution, were terrified what that revolution might mean. Is Peckinpah a reactionary artist? Periiaps. But Peckinpah’s inclination to constantly straddle, with his heroes, the border between commitment and evasion to a progressive sociopolitics speaks to self-consciousness about his limitations and those of his heroes. Elmore Leonard, while never visible enough in the 1960s to express a politics in public, used reluctant heroes of color to explore anxieties these men of color might have about assimilation to racist social values. But Leonard, like Peckinpah, imagined the potential of the western as at best an indictment of its own limitations, and Leonard’s western heroes, like Peckinpah’s, never confidently serve a revolutionary a g e n d a . ^^ Peckinpah played the outlaw director in public and even showed sympathy with movements on the left, but the director, like Leonard, was unable to imagine his white heroes serving revolutionary ends. In the next chapter I explore one of the 1960s’ most popular political artists: Bob Dylan. Because of Dylan’s extraordinarily diverse output in the 1960s he has never been adequately analyzed in terms of his western heroes. This is unfortunate because Dylan, like Leonard and Peckinpah, used the western hero as an image of sociopolitical commitment and evasion. More than either Leonard or Peckinpah, however, Dylan was explicitly associated with political movements on the left. Dylan’s western imagery reveals a dual interest in the westerner as political hero and outlaw avoiding allegiance to any political group. This dual image gave the musician a self- reflexive means of expressing political commitments while escaping responsibility for political movements of which he was seen as a heroic leader.

Even Valdez is Coming ( 1970 ). Leonard’s nod to anti-racist militancy, ends in a standoff where it is not entirely clear what will happen next. 198 CHAPTER 6

“DRIFTER’S ESCAPE”; BOB DYLAN’S WESTERN HEROES

Discussions of the western most often involve the media of film, literature, or television. In fact, the most popular manifestations of the western in the 1960s probably occurred on television, with the film industry offering a number of westerns as well. But popular music affords a venue for western imagery that is often explicitly tied to political action and, therefore, particularly suited to the politics of commitment and evasion described throughout this dissertation. Country music, rhythm and blues music, rock ‘n’ roll music, and perhaps especially the stage of folk song revival roughly beginning in 1958, with the Kingston Trio’s version of the Appalachian murder ballad “Tom Dooley,” all explored western imagery in the late 1950s and 1960s. Western imagery was popular in Marty Robbins’s country concept albums Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1959) and More Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (1961). And the rock ‘n’ roll classic Bo Diddlev is a Gunslinger (1960) is another instance of popular music’s response to the unprecedented number of horse operas on American television at the time. Furthermore, western imagery is everywhere in the 1960s folk revival, drawing inspiration from the prewar collections of cowboy songs in field recordings by John and Alan Lomax and from the work of Woody Guthrie, Jack Elliott, and other inspirational precedents to the 1960s folk revivalists; from popular country music; and from the film and television westerns that saturated popular culture before the 1960s. Easily the most important figure in the early 1960s folk revival, both at the heart of its commercial and cultural success and its transformation into the counterculture of the late 1960s, is Bob Dylan.

199 Sorting out Bob Dylan’s politics is not easy. His songs, more than any others in the period, served as anthems for sociopolitical engagement, and his singing and writing were agents of change. However, even Dylan’s most explicitly political songs contain elements of both personal evasion and critique; Dylan critiques his own ability and the abilities of his contemporaries to enact change, and he critiques the medium of folk song itself. Often it is difficult to distinguish between Dylan’s evasion of responsibility and layers of critique since both can be read as political disengagement. Therefore, among his followers there have been years of accusations about his selling out and a long line of apologists waiting to redefine his mission in political terms. Fittingly, Dylan’s political engagements and evasions, his idealism about rebellion and his sense of the limitations of heroic models, are often expressed through the western hero. In the following chapter I show that the western hero is perfectly fitted to Dylan’s sociopolitical ambiguities. Also, I show that the critique of the medium of folk song and social protest, when expressed through western heroic imagery, doubles as a revisionist critique of the genre and its heroes, revealing both the sociopolitical uses and limitations of generic conventions. Bob Dylan’s reluctance to speak for a generation is expressed through his choices and descriptions of western heroes. Sometimes, as with Leonard’s and Peckinpah’s heroes, Dylan’s western heroes are reluctant to serve others. In these instances Dylan’s heroes escape being exploited by accusers, needy damsels, angry mobs, or more ambiguous sources of fear. At other times, however, Dylan’s heroes are not necessarily reluctant so much as they are self-consciously morally dubious versions of “good outlaws’’ like Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” This morally suspect second type is used self- reflexively by Dylan to critique the limitations of the hero type, the political community celebrating this type, and Dylan himself. Therefore, even when Dylan’s western heroes are not themselves reluctant, they may still express Dylan’s reluctance to serve various sociopolitical groups of his time, from the folk revival community of the early 1960s to the youth counterculture of the late 1960s. Sometimes Dylan’s western heroes appear in complete narrative ballads, and at other times they appear suddenly in verses of non- narrative blues structures. But, wherever they appear in Dylan’s music, these western heroes express an artist’s anxieties about political alliances and movements, many of which

200 his music helped to form. Of all of the heroes explored in this dissertation, Dylan’s are probably the most self-reflexive. Furthermore, given Dylan’s associations with 1960s political change, the singer’s reluctant and morally suspect heroes may be the most overtly sociopolitical. The following chapter begins with a brief history of the sociopolitics of the folk song revival in which Dylan began his artistic and political career. I explore the revival in detail to establish the leftist politics informing the movement and the authenticity politics governing participation therein. It was in the folk revival that Dylan first experienced artistic and political success along with the pressures of responsibility that created an evasive artist Second, I chronicle Dylan’s career in stages, beginning with (1) his acoustic folk music and his early reluctance about being exploited as an artist then moving on to (2) his defensive redefinition of folk and rock politics in the mid-1960s, (3) his agrarian sabbatical from responsibility from 1966 to 1967, (4) his stint as a country singer in the late 1960s, and (5) his limited retum to political commitment in the 1970s. At each of these stages, Dylan used western heroic imagery to express anxieties about his responsibilities to fans and 1960s politicos. As I explore each of these stages, I situate my readings of Dylan’s western imagery in analyses of other songs and the state of Dylan’s sociopolitical and artistic career with an emphasis on how these details illuminate the western heroic imagery. Nevertheless, the following is not a reading of Dylan’s music in breadth. Rather, this chapter explores one of the 1960s’ most political artist’s uses of the western hero to express reluctance about his own heroic position as the voice of a generation.

THE POLITICS OF THE FOLK REVIVAL

Bob Dylan’s sociopolitical engagement, evasion, and critique must be understood in the context of folk revivalism and its 1960s Greenwich Village avatar, which was steeped in leftist politics but also had a less explicitly political dimension. There is no single folk song revival in the twentieth century. Moreover, even if we can identify a specific trajectory of revivalism leading up to the 1960s folk community, there is no single

201 source for this trajectory. Nevertheless, the trajectory of revival culminating in Dylan’s early music is worth mapping for the very reason of outlining the complexity of its lineage and how this complexity carried over into Dylan’s milieu. The dates one attributes to the revival show the historian’s interests as much as they represent historical veracity. Robert Lumer, for instance, dates the folk song revival from 1938 to 1964 because his primary goal is to show Pete Seeger’s contribution to folk song (45). In the 1920s, rural blues artists signed commercial contracts, and the famous Bristol sessions in Tennessee discovered now-foimdational old time country acts like the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. Moreover, the city blues of artists like Bessie Smith preceded rural blues and country music as a commercial force. Nevertheless, this apparent commercial juggernaut, which staggered at the beginning of the Depression, has usually not been treated as part of the folk music revival, despite the influence of many of these commercial artists on later revivalists. Lumer and others tie the beginning of the folk music revival to 1930s communism, “the Americanism of the 20th century” (53). In this historical model, artists like Pete Seeger struggled “to revive the historical process by which folk music had previously come into being.[ ...] by which ordinary people remembered older music and changed it somewhat to fit their needs” (45). Conveniently, for Seeger and the American communists, the people’s needs were seen as matching the Party’s need for a “radical alternative to commercial mass music” (45). In a move similar to Lumer’s, Richard Reuss also locates the folk music revival with the communists of the 1930s. Reuss’s Seeger, however, is the elder ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger. Documenting Charles Seeger’s 1932 involvement with the Marxist Composers Collective, Reuss uses an incident when Seeger met Aunt Molly Jackson to show how he “learned to distinguish the propaganda factor that is ‘inborn’ from that which is superficially imposed from without” (236). In the case of Charles Seeger, like son Pete, traditional music becomes a link between leftist politics and the people, or at least a romantic idealization of the people. The musical traditions of “the folk” authenticate the agendas of American leftists, and these traditions become a currency to counteract the excesses of commercial culture.

202 Both Lumer and Reuss choose tentative origins in order to serve their respective interests. There are, however, earlier precedents, and the aforementioned surge of country, blues, and jazz recording was not the only “folk” music to precede that defined by 1930s communism. Thirties American communism and its interest in folk music followed the lead of political ancestors like the Industrial Workers of the World (TWW), formed in 1905 “as a radical alternative to the mainstream unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL)” (Hampton 61). The IWW, or “Wobblies,” produced future American communist leaders like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and musical troubadours like martyr Joe Hill. The Alfred Hayes-Earl Robinson ballad “Joe Hill” has become a common political anthem, performed by everyone firom Civil Rights and leftist hero Paul Robeson (1952) to

1960s folk matriarch Joan Baez (1969).^^ When Joan Baez performed “Joe Hill” at Woodstock in 1969, she found precedent for late 1960s socizd action in the Wobblies (60). Just as the American Communist Party of the 1930s did not invent political folk song, it was hardly the last phase of the folk song revival. Lund and Denisoff note that the postwar version of this revival had a slightly different tenor. Certainly, the rise of McCarthyism contributed to this shift in the nature of the revival in more ways than one. The “witch hunts” of the McCarthy era reduced the salience of the American communists, but Beat culture was quick to pick up the folk music, “Beatniks” becoming “folkniks” in a growing New York folk scene (399). Likewise, folk revival music gained commercial force in the 1950s. Pete Seeger, who originally saw folk music as an alternative to commercial music, nonetheless led his band the Weaver’s to commercial success with songs like Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” “a revision of ‘The Great Dust Storm,’ altered for popular consumption”: i.e., the story of the forced migration of its Dust Bowl farmers is transformed into “a story of lovers marrying and leaving town” (Hampton 140). Most significant, however, are the 1950 Weavers’s version of Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene” and the Kingston Trio’s 1958 recording of “Tom Dooley,” from the murder ballad “Tom Dula,” both of which led to a substantial market for “folk” music on college campuses (Cantwell 7, Hampton 140-141).

44 Robeson’s performance is available on his album The Political Years. Baez’s is on both the album and film Woodstock. 203 Undoubtedly, the resurgence of folk music in the late 1950s and early 1960s found inspiration in the politics of labor and American communism, but recent discussions of the revival, especially Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good (1996), speak to the dimension of the postwar revival that was sociopolitically distinct from the IWW and the 1930s communists as well as to the often contradictory political forces at work in the revival all along. Cantwell notes that Teddy Roosevelt wrote the 1912 preface to John Lomax’s Cowbov Songs and that Roosevelt was particularly pleased with the ballad “Jesse James” since Frank James had supported his Missouri campaign (7). Roosevelt’s interest in the cowboy songs collected by Lomax is just one example of a masculinist, conservative strain of early twentieth-century folk revivalism that intersected with and no doubt conflicted with the leftist orientation of many early revivalists: Hence a masculine and “muscular” reaction, symbolized by the robust Teddy Roosevelt, which emphasized male independence, strength, autonomy, and virility, stressing the self-sufficient outdoor life of the soldier, the hunter, the scout, the cowboy, or the wilderness guide, arose to complete the bifurcation of antimodemism along gender lines. This so-called muscular Christianity, without its distinctive religious coloring, lingered on in American society until well after World War n in summer camps, scout troops, YMCAs, outing clubs, and the like, many of which became repositories of revived folk crafts and songs and, with the elite Anglo-American Country Dance Society, contributed to the postwar revival. (29) The political dimension of the early revival served a progressive class politics, but it also served a masculinist American chauvinism in which immigrants assimilated to hegemonic American values, masculinity found an ideological outlet in folk culture, and the handicrafts of summer camps “prepared the youngster for life in the capitalist marketplace” (29-30). Some of the sexism of this strain may not be inconsistent with the contradictions of the prewar left, but other revival activity noted by Cantwell most certainly is, particularly Hemy Ford’s and John D. Rockefeller’s sponsorship of folk events “to museumize the preindustrial artisan economy” their businesses helped destroy (31). Cantwell also notes that the break up of the Weavers in 1950, after being listed in the paranoid publication Red Channels: Communist Influence on Radio and Television, created a mid-1950s gap in the commercialization of folk music that helped depoliticize folk music by the time of the Kingston Trio. I do not think Cantwell would call the late 1950s and early 1960s revival entirely apolitical. However, he notes the importance of two

204 sociopolitical phenomena in the 1950s; (1) the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) trials and blacklists of the late 1940s and early 1950s; (2) the growth of an affluent suburban white population encouraged to go to college in unprecedented numbers. This combination in turn replaced prewar leftist politics with the generation gap: “Slowly a conception formed, more taste than ideology, more style than discourse, more interpersonal than historical, that the world had been gravely mismanaged by the parent generation” (324). I recount the roots of the revival of the early 1960s to note that the question of Dylan’s politics is complicated by the question of the revival’s politics at large. Dylan entered the scene in a time when defiidtions of folk music as something antithetical to popular rock ‘n’ roll music operated as an authenticity politics. Therefore, Dylan’s status with some revivalists became a casualty of this authenticity politics when he began playing electric rock ‘n’ roll music in the mid-1960s. But beyond its ability to mobilize a youth in­ crowd with leftist leanings, the revival’s tendency to equate acoustic music with folkness and political commitment had dubious merit when it came to real sociopolitical change. Exacerbating this authenticity politics was the legacy of HUAC, with friend turning against friend in an attempt to plea bargain the fates of careers. HUAC created a palpable rift in the political wing of the folk revival so that being seen as a leader must have come with a certain amount of anxiety. Lastly, Dylan entered the scene at a time when the political fray was being redefined around the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement complicated the notion of speaking for others, especially since many involved in the politics of the 1960s revival were affluent Jewish and Caucasian people, and the fear of speaking for others is at the center of Dylan’s music. It was into this complex community of political activism and youth self-definition through folk revivalism that Dylan emerged as the voice of a generation, and the western heroes in Dylan’s music embody notions of heroic leadership and rebellion, but the dual function of this rebellion in Dylan’s music seeks sociopolitical change tempered by a rebellion against the notion of heroism itself.

205 THE OUTLAW-GAMBLER AND “BOB DYLAN’S BLUES”; A RELUCTANT ‘TOLK” HERO, 1960-1965

A compulsive creator of his own legend, young Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1960 determined to be a folk singer. To this end he masked his Minnesota origins in a catalog of tall tales. He claimed to be bom an orphan from New Mexico, to have met Woody Guthrie in California, to have learned cowboy styles from actual cowboys, and to have traveled in a carnival (Filene 205-206). In 1959 and 1960, when Dylan was still a student at the University of Minnesota trying to balance his daytime life in a fraternity with his night life in the Minneapolis folk district Dinkeytown, he would tell some that he played behind Little Richard, his teenage idol (Scaduto 38). He would tell others that he played for rock star Bobby Vee, “went on for Vee when he was sick,” or even that he was Bobby Vee (38). Bob Dylan was actually bom Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Miimesota in 1941, and raised comfortably middle-class in the predominantly working-class mining town of Hibbing. His identification with the working-class sympathies of his future hero Woody Guthrie were probably bom in Hibbing, but also bom here was the affluence that attended many white baby boomers’ engagements with political action and the folk revival. As early as 1960, Dylan was recording a variety of folk songs for friends. He recorded western songs like Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” the ominous “Trail of the Buffalo,” and the outlaw ballad “Jesse James” at the East Orange, New Jersey home of “fastidious folk collectors” Sidsel and Bob Gleason in Febraary of 1961 (Scaduto 66, Heylin 1-4). In 1961 he also recorded the now infamous bootlegs the Minnesota Party Tape and the Minneapolis Hotel Tape, the latter named for Bonnie Beecher’s apartment where it was recorded, a crash pad jokingly called “The Beecher Hotel” (Heylin 4-5). Dylan’s first official recordings were released by Columbia in 1962, and included only two songs written by the artist, “Talkin’ New York,” a send up of his experiences in the city, and “Song to Woody,” an homage to his hero Woody Guthrie. But it is with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dvlan (1963), one of the extraordinary works of the 1960s, that he established himself at the center of the revival and leftist politics.

206 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dvlan. released on May 27, is perhaps most famous for “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a political anthem in the same league as ‘This Land is Our Land” (13). The song shared the day with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the historic March on Washington, August 28,1963, and Jim Miller claims that Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” rivaled “We Shall Overcome” as “the political anthem of the hour” (60). On Freewheelin’ songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Oxford Town,” and ‘Talkin’ World War m Blues” articulate fears of nuclear annihilation and wage verbal war on American racism. Nevertheless, Freewheelin’ as a whole represents a complicated vision. It is an album that starts with “Slowin’ in the Wind” and ends with the escapism of the following verse from “I Shall Be Free”: Well, ask me why I’m dmnk alia time. It levels my head and eases my mind. I just walk along and stroll and sing, I see better days and I do better things. (I catch dinosaurs I make love to Elizabeth Taylor. . . Catch hell from Richard Burton!) (69)^5

“Freewheelin’” indeed! If “Slowin’ in the Wind” is widely acknowledged to provide only cryptic answers to its questions about war, human callousness, and social prejudice, the song is at least committed to asking the questions. In “I Shall Be Free” the ultimate freedom is drunkenness and fantasy. It is fitting, for example, that in Dylan’s Lyrics (1990) the escapism of dinosaur hunting, Elizabeth Taylor loving, and Richard Burton brawling is actually parenthetical. The equation of escapism with “better things” need not be at the expense of the album’s more serious political songs, but the playfulness of Dylan’s parting words point to the artist’s unwillingness to take his dire political visions too seriously. More overtly political songs on Freewheelin’ also betray a dissatisfaction with the very folk community Dylan’s music helped to foster. ‘Talkin’ World War HI Blues,” for example, chronicles the narrator-singer’s confession of a post-apocalyptic nightmare to a psychiatrist who, along with everybody else, appropriates the singer’s dream as his own.

Unless otherwise noted, all references to Bob Dylan’s lyrics are taken from Lvrics. 1962-1985 (1990). 207 The song is a dystopian vision of atomic destruction but also a meditation upon an artist’s fear of speaking for others. The song’s last line, then, works as an invitation to share the artist’s vision, but it is an ironic invitation; “T’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.’ / 1 said that” (65). The invitation implies that the listener must give up the freedom of her or his own privacy in exchange for the singer’s vision, and the self-quotation patents the singer’s words even as these words indicate shared dreams and experiences. “Bob Dylan’s Dream” is another case in point. “Bob Dylan’s Dream” suggests a young artist’s lack of faith in the longevity of any movement I wish, I wish, I wish in vain. That we could sit simply in that room again. Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat. I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that. (62) The last lines of the song reveal that this narrative of an artist’s dream about old friends is also about another kind of “dream” insofar as it may never have been “like that” in the first place. There is also some question about what “that” means, since the idea of living “simply” can be read in contradiction to the excess of “Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat.” Does “that” refer to the lucrative or the simple alternative? What has really been lost? Or does “that” refer to living simply as a result of wealth, where to “sit simply” is to have leisure, to live in ignorance of the costs of wealth and privilege? This stanza exemplifies Bob Dylan’s songwriting, which often initiates multiple and even divergent readings. Dylan uses folk song to critique excess, but folk singing is implicated in this critique when “the drop of a hat” tums from street-comer singing to big business. Moreover, the singer too is implicated in this critique, potentially longing for the simplicity of this excess without . .. what? Guilt? Responsibility? “Bob Dylan’s Dream” belongs with “Girl From the North Country” and Dylan’s version of “Corrina, Corrina,” both songs of lost love, and the bitter farewell “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Along with these songs on Freewheelin’. “Bob Dylan’s Dream” forms the personal core of a very political album. Moreover, the personal aspects of “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” along with the ironies of the more political material like “Talkin’ World War m Blues,” lend themselves to a reading of the limitations of Dylan’s folk milieu.

208 There is nothing explicitly political about “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” but it speaks to the limitations of the narrator’s wish for a simpler time, intimating the potential corruption of money lurking in the singer’s supposedly simpler past. Bob Dylan’s sociopolitical dreams and aspirations for America overlap with those expressed in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Singer’s “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington, but the song “Bob Dylan’s Dream” warns of the dangers of illusions and “Talkin’ World War m Blues” of the potential coopting of an artist’s vision. With this in mind, it is interesting that “Bob Dylan’s Dream” was actually a replacement for the western song “Rambling, Gambling Willie” originally slated for Freewheelin’. In the liner notes for Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (1991), on which “Rambling, Gambling Willie” now officially appears, John Bauldie writes; A spirited tale of the larger-than-life outlaw-gambler Will O’Conley would almost certainly have been released on Freewheelin’—it was included on early, now highly collectible, test pressings of the LP—had not the release date been put back. [...] At the last minute, then, “Rambling, Gambling Willie” (along with three other tracks) was ousted from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and the more recently written “Bob Dylan’s Dream” was substituted. (12) Bauldie calls “Rambling, Gambling Willie” “a delightful romp of a song, witty, infectiously energetic, full of marvelous rhyming and plenty of downright fun.” Such a description might imply that the sadder “Bob Dylan’s Dream” is an alternative to the more celebratory genre piece, but beneath the upbeat exterior of “Rambling, Gambling Willie” lurks a great deal of ambiguity about heroism, ambiguity that, had it been included on the original album, would have tempered the album’s sociopolitical heroics as much or more than its replacement Bauldie notes that “Dylan has fashioned his rakish outlaw-gambler with the heart of gold from an equally folk-heroic figure, the Irish highwayman Willie Brennen hanged in Cork in 1804” and that the source for Dylan’s song is the ballad “Brennen On The Moor,” based on the life of the highwayman. However, Bauldie also quotes Dylan as saying, “I would think of Brennen On The Moor the same way as I would think of Jesse James or something.” The European thematic roots and tune sources for Anglo-American outlaw ballads are widely acknowledged, but Dylan’s equation of Brennen and, by association, Willie with Jesse James speaks to the broader associations of Dylan’s song with the 209 western trappings of the good outlaw tradition. Most interesting to me is the resemblance Dylan’s song bears to his hero Woody Guthrie’s good outlaw ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd,’’ which along with “Tom load—Part 1” and “Tom load—Part 2” puts outlawry at the center of Guthrie’s politicized narratives of human hardship on the classic Dust Bowl Ballads (1940). In the influential essay “Some Varieties of Heroes in America’’ (1967), Roger D. Abrahams describes the phenomenon of the “‘good’ outlaw”: “These heroes are attached to a region or a cause, provoked into action by external pressure and not internal psychic need, and even when forced into a life of ‘crime,’ retain their essential virtue” (348). Abrahams’s examples include Jesse and Frank James and Billy the Kid, and he notes that “in American popular literature” and “the folklore of white rural communities,” these outlaws can be transformed into leaders (348). Such an outlaw is Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd: a regional hero with a cause, a man provoked and wrongfully accused, and a man of virtue. On his 1940 Librarv of Congress Recordings. Guthrie is asked by musicologist Alan Lomax, “Do you know any songs about outlaws, desperados, badman, bank robbers, or anything of that kind?” Guthrie replies: Of course, I know of a song about Sam Bass, Jesse James, Bob and Emmett Dalton, Belle Starr, Billy the Kid. This here one here’s about an outlaw that really come from about 17 miles from where I was bom and raised, and I know people all through his section of the country, and he knows people all through my section of the country. And, for about four or five years—we won’t make him sound too ancient on the outlaw list, but he did make a name. And he made a pretty name; “Pretty Boy Floyd” they called him. He was named “Pretty Boy” for his “bell bottomed britches,” and Guthrie goes on to describe Floyd as a “smilin’, easy goin’ man” but with “something in his system that fought back.” In the song, Floyd, armed with a log chain, kills a gun-wielding sheriff in Shawnee, Oklahoma for using “harsh language” around Pretty Boy’s wife. All of Abrahams’s elements are here: Pretty Boy is outgunned when he stands up for the virtue of a lady, outlawed by circumstance until finally, according to Guthrie’s description to Lomax, rumors of “three guns in each hand and a whole bunch more in his pocket” force Floyd into a life of robbery. According to Guthrie’s description. Pretty Boy says, “they’re gettin’ the money. I’m gettin’ the advertisement,” and he decides that he should get the 210 money if his reputation is paying the price. Guthrie calls Floyd “more popular than any governor Oklahoma ever had” and an enemy to the banks but not to the workers. Then, Guthrie sings; Well, you say that I’m an outlaw. You say that I’m a thief. Here’s a Christmas dinner For the families on relief. Now, as through this world I’ve hoboed. I’ve seen lots of funny men. Seen men rob you with a six-gun. Some with a fountain pen. But as through your life you ramble. Yes, as through your life you roam. You will never see an outlaw Drive a family from their home. Pretty Boy Floyd’s heroism is the product of widespread unemployment in Depression-era America and, specifically, in Dust Bowl Oklahoma. He robs banks but will never “drive a family from their home.” In fact, like Robin Hood, he gives to the poor “families on relief’ and pays the mortgage of “many a starvin’ farmer.” Moreover, in Guthrie’s song, Floyd’s supposed outlawry is opposed to crimes against the laws of humanity, i.e., the bankers’ callousness to human suffering in their greed for money. Perhq)s the most telling testament to the potential heroism of outlaws in Guthrie’s mind occurs in the conversation that follows “Pretty Boy Floyd” on the 1940 recordings. Lomax and Guthrie fondly discuss Jesse James before Guthrie makes the transition to his next song, “They Laid Jesus Christ in His Grave.” He makes this transition with the statement “I’m gonna sing you a song about another outlaw.” It is no mistake that Guthrie calls the killers of Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd “Judases.” When Bob Ford shoots Jesse James in the back while Jesse hangs a picture, he is not ridding the world of a violent menace. Rather, Ford is a “dirty coward” killing a hero, and Jesse James, like Pretty Boy Floyd and Robin Hood before him, heroically resembles Christ. Dylan’s “Rambling, Gambling Willie” is clearly kin to “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Dylan sings: But Willie had a heart of gold and this I know is true. He supported all his children, and all their mothers too. 211 He wore no rings or fancy things, like other gamblers wore. He spread his money far and wide, to help the sick and poor. (11-12) Herein lies Willie’s Robin Hood persona. Sexually successful by the standards of any rounder, Willie is also economically responsible. He is a gentleman of sorts and, at the same time, a masculinist fantasy. Most important to the tradition in which Dylan’s song finds its precedent, Willie is charitable, recalling Pretty Boy Floyd’s Christmas dinner for the families on relief and Guthrie’s claim that “You will never see an outlaw drive a family firom their home.” Willie is generous and modest about his winnings, and, if not an outlaw, he is no less heir to a violent heroic tradition. Willie dies a gunfighter’s death, holding “aces backed with eights,” the “Dead Man’s Hand.” Aces and eights was the famous hand Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot in the back by Jack McCall in 1876. But if the allusion to Hickok gives Willie a violent death like those of Pretty Boy Floyd and Jesse James, it also begins to point to the differences between Willie and these good outlaws. In the first place, while Hickok is clearly one of the West’s most famous gunfighters—by most accounts he invented the gunfight—he is not an outlaw. More famous as an on-again-off- again lawman, a card player, and an all-around frontiersman, Hickok’s historical person zind dime-novel persona are strikingly different firom those of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and, later. Pretty Boy Floyd. While Hickok encountered famous outlaws, it was often as harbinger of the establishment rather than as regional outlaw hero himself. For example, take his famous encounter with Texas outlaw hero John Wesley Hardin. As Abilene, Kansas lawman. Wild Bill purportedly asked for Hardin’s guns, butt first. Hardin feigned compliance only to swing the handles back into his palms, an “old trick known as the road agent’s roll,” getting the drop on Hickok (Nordyke 106). Historians will probably never sort the facts from the fiction in this story, but the facts seem less important for our purposes than what the story says about Wild Bill Hickok’s persona, which, in this case, resembles the sheriff in “Pretty Boy Floyd” more than it resembles the outlaw hero. Willie, like Wild Bill, is a professional. He may be generous, but his motivations seem driven by “psychic need” as much as they are by any cause. Finally, benevolence aside, he accrues wealth. In Dylan’s line, “But Willie had a heart of gold and this I know

212 is true," the key word may be “But” The attestation to Willie’s “heart of gold” follows a bit of card sharpery that might make a Depression-era banker proud and send Pretty Boy Floyd looking for his killin’ chain; Up in the Rocky Mountains in a town called Cripple Creek, There was an all-night poker game, lasted about a week. Nine hundred miners had laid their money down. When Willie finally left the room, he owned the whole damn town.

In the second verse of “Rambling, Gambling Willie,” Bob Dylan sings that Willie “gambled in the White House and in the railroad yards.” An equal opportunity gambler, Willie will take money from the President or a fellow drifter (e.g., a rail worker or a hobo) with equal enthusiasm. However, part of the moral ambiguity that Dylan’s song negotiates is the problem of taking money from the latter. Five months before recording “Rambling, Gambling Willie” for Columbia, Bob Dylan lashed out at the economic luxury of the overclass. His disdain was put on tape in Bonnie Beecher’s Minneapolis apartment in the song “Hard Times in New York Town” (Heylin 2). The song chronicles the adventures of a hard traveler sickened by New York City’s general inhumanity, and its indictment of wealth comes with the lines. It’s a mighty long way from the Golden Gate To Rockefeller Plaza ‘n’ the Empire State. Mister Rockefeller sets up as high as a bird. Old Mister Empire never says a word. (7)

These lines personify Rockefeller Plaza and the state of New York, but they also allude to the Rockefeller fortune. Rockefeller’s elevated status is joined by the state’s cold silence to the hard traveler who has gotten nothing but lumps from New York City.^ In light of “Hard Times in New York Town” and the assumptions we might make about young Dylan’s attitude toward wealth, Willie seems less heroic, at least in the Guthrie sense. “Rambling, Gambling Willie” recalls the charity of “Pretty Boy Floyd” only enough to drive home the contradictions of Dylan’s conunercially lucrative folk scene. Willie helps the “sick and poof” but also gambles with miners for their “whole damn

In the Beecher recording, Dylan sings, “Mister Empire sits up as high as a bird, while old Mister Rockefeller never says a word.” This phrasing, different from the LydSi phrasing quoted above, perhaps suggests the height of the Empire State Building, while equating the millionaire Rockefeller, and the Plaza, with the Empire State Building, New York itself, and economic imperialism. 213 town.” Tall-tale humor of “an all-night poker game” that “lasted about a week” aside, Willie’s not taking money from a Rockefeller here. His heroism, if cut from the cloth of folk legend, is ambivalent, and the song’s final verse explores materialism: So all you rovin’ gamblers, wherever you might be. The moral of the story is very plain to see. Make your money while you can, before you have to stop. For when you draw the dead man’s hand, your gamblin’ days are up. And it’s ride, Willie ride. Roll, Willie, roU, Wherever you are a-gamblin’ now, nobody knows. By the song’s end Willie resembles 1930s Hollywood’s urban gangsters, tragic victims of money and power, more than he resembles the rural, proletariat heroism of Pretty Boy Floyd. The song’s chorus, “And it’s ride, Willie ride, / Roll, Willie, roll, / Wherever you are a-gamblin’ now, nobody knows,” is twisted from a celebration of Willie’s rambling lifestyle to a question about his moral fate. Is he “a-gamblin”’ in heaven or hell? Nobody knows. The song fits nicely with the left’s attitudes about capital; you certainly can’t take it with you. But Dylan has alluded to Guthrie’s Floyd through a much more ambivalent heroism, and this allusion draws attention to the limitations of the good outlaw hero type and/or to Dylan and the revival itself, since Dylan and fellow revivalists drew inspiration from Guthrie’s model. Both Guthrie and Dylan use the western hero for social critique, but while Guthrie’s hero provides a vicarious lashing out at the banks Dylan’s hero is finally unflattering, even a warning. Are Dylan and his folk contemporaries somehow commercially motivated where Guthrie was not? Not necessarily. Nevertheless, Dylan’s western hero, like the last lines of “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” reveals an ambivalence about the 1960s folk song revival and about Dylan’s participation therein, an ambivalence that accurately describes Dylan’s relationship with 1960s movements in general. “Rambling, Gambling Willie” represents an ambiguous treatment of heroism in a western context that could have been at the core Freewheelin’, supplementing the ironies of political songs like “Talkin’ World War lU Blues.” The implied reference to the good outlaw tradition of “Pretty Boy Floyd” and Woody Guthrie, a political and musical hero to Dylan and other folk revivalists, mounts a celebration of the tradition, but Dylan’s is a celebration rendered ironic by the moral ambiguities of the gambler hero. Another song recorded during the Freewheelin’ sessions but not included on the album reveals Dylan’s 214 suspicion of heroism much more didactically, though not in the accouterments of the western. On “Hero Blues,” recorded December 6,1962, the singer’s “gal” demands that he “be a hero / So she can tell all her friends” (Heylin 14, Lyrics 41). Describing the female Quixote, the reluctant hero sings; She reads too many books She got new movies inside her head She reads too many books She got new movies inside her head She wants me to walk out miming She wants me to crawl back dead[.] While the joke about her enthusiastic desire for him to bravely die recalls a million “I’m- caUing-you-out” boasts into a million western streets in the history of the gerue, the generic cormection here is more militaristic, as he adds in the next line that she needs “Napoleon Boneeparte.” Most suggestive in an otherwise obvious song is the song’s final equation of the celebration of heroism with the hero’s demise: Well, when I’m dead No more good times will I crave Well, when I’m dead No more good times will I crave You can stand and shout hero All over my lonesome grave[.]

“Hero Blues” hinges on a misogynistic scapegoating of the damsel in distress, a theme to which Dylan returns in later songs, but the song also redefines masculine heroism by commenting upon the absurdity of the price of heroism. The future hero’s life itself becomes the currency in the exchange that yields heroism, and this exchange is governed by the conventions of the woman’s books and movies and of the folk song tradition. “Hero Blues,” along with “Rambling, Gambling Willie,” finds its most interesting commentary on the heroic in its emphasis on the hero’s death, but “Hero Blues” resembles “Talkin’ World War IE Blues” even more in its interest in the potential exploitation of the singer. Therefore, two patterns begin to arise in Dylan’s treatment of heroism. On the one hand, Dylan’s heroes are morally suspect versions of earlier heroes, questioning the very notion of heroism. Certainly, traditions of outlaw balladry have always been full of moral ambiguity, but “Rambling, Gambling Willie” is revisionist not for the originality of its 215 morally tainted hero but rather as a commentary on the heroism in the celebratory “Pretty Boy Floyd.” On the other hand, Dylan’s heroes evade heroic responsibility, though this evasion may be accompanied by critique as well, as is the case in “Hero Blues.” In fact, there is a degree to which the critique becomes the evasion, setting particularly low heroic expectations for the singer. Both of these patterns, critique and evasion, seem to be clear in “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” a song on Freewheelin’ that expresses the heroic themes within a frame of western imagery. “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is sandwiched on the album between “Masters of War,” which finally wishes death on all those in power who manufacture weapons and send others to die, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” one of Dylan’s most apocalyptic visions. Compared to these songs, “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is notable for its conspicuous facetiousness. The song is five verses; the verses at either end are western, while the three middle verses are about women, sports cars, and rambling, respectively. Verse two: Oh you five and ten cent women W i± nothin’ in your heads I got a real gal I’m lovin’ And lord I’ll love her till I’m dead Go away from my door and my window too[.] (58) This is a pretty standard blues warning against cheap women, opting instead for a “real gal.” By itself, this verse could be in a dozen songs. In the context of Dylan’s oeuvre, this is an unspectacular example of the singer’s acceptance or rejection of other characters, often female, to dramatize his feelings about fame and responsibility. Songs like “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (1964) and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (1965) are notable examples, “Positively 4th Street” (1965) an angrier gender-neutral example: Yes, I wish that for just one time You could stand inside my shoes You’d know what a drag it is To see you[.] (211) People have often struggled to figure out who these songs are about, but, while there may be people in Dylan’s mind when he writes and sings, the songs begin to accumulate as a reflexive catalog about the pressures and betrayals of a career. Dylan’s apparent misanthropy and misogyny in the angriest of these songs often speaks to his stress about the expectations of colleagues and fans. “I just can’t have people sit around and make rules 216 for me,” Dylan once told Nat Hentoff after denying participation in any movement (qtd. in Scaduto 212). His songs about relationships are fiill of thinly veiled disavowals of so- called friends and fans. In “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” the “real gal” becomes one instance of many in Dylan’s music where the singer takes the politicized organizing slogan “Whose side are you on?” only to reverse it and turn it back on the listeners who might demand his allegiance, a technique that becomes more frequent once Dylan starts getting attacked for selling out everything from folk music to the politics of “the Movement.” Therefore, on one hand, when the singer in “Bob Dylan’s Blues” says “Go away from my door and my window too” he is carefully picking his friends, like any good politician. On the other hand, the verse is just “good, simple living”: Lord, I ain’t goin’ down no race track See no sports car run I don’t have no sports car And I don’t even care to have one I can walk anytime around the block[.] (58) The source of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is materialism, the lavish nonsense of a leisured 1950s and 1960s that brought us James Bond and Plavbov. And to “walk anytime around the block” is a simple response, like Woody Guthrie’s rambling. Nevertheless, this walking has a price: Well, the wind keeps a-blowin’ me Up and down the street With my hat in my hand And my boots on my feet Watch out so you don’t step on me[.] Blowing in the wind, like Dylan’s cryptic answers to life's tough questions, the singer’s “walk anytime around the block” suddenly seems far less voluntary. Surrealistic and silly as an image of a tiny Dylan persona tumbling with the leaves might be, the plea “don’t step on me” represents a serious fear. A big star suddenly seems small, as big stars are often

217 apt to. By 1963 Dylan knows that his words are important to some, but he also knows the stakes of his celebrity. It is in acknowledgement of these stakes that Dylan frames “Bob Dylan’s Blues” in western trappings. The song opens: Well, the Lone Ranger and Tonto They are ridin’ down the line Fixin’ ev’rybody’s troubles Ev’rybody’s ‘cept mine Somebody musta tol’ 'em That I was doin’ fine[.] In some ways the singer is “doin’ fine,” living a simple life, free of the trappings of “five and ten cent women” and sports cars. But it is notable that the singer here is not the hero, but the one in potential need of help. In the song “Guess I’m Doin’ Fine” (1964), Dylan sings: Well, I ain’t got my childhood Or friends I once did know. No, I ain’t got my childhood Or friends I once did know. But I still got my voice left, I can take it anywhere I go. Hey, hey, so I guess I’m doin’ fine. (123) What consolation it is to have his “voice left” is perhaps left to the listener. Likewise, the listener can decide whether the singer needs rescuing by the “masked man” and his Indian friend in “Bob Dylan’s Blues.” The song, like others we have already explored, is titled a “blues,” so the singer of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” caimot be totally “doin’ fine.” It is worth pondering whether Dylan has chosen the Lone Ranger and Tonto over heroes closer to his folk roots (e.g., Jesse James or Pretty Boy Floyd) to exploit the popular culture image of the heroic duo. Particularly, the Lone Ranger and Tonto differ strikingly from the good outlaw tradition insofar as their heroism is more often associated with maintaining the stability of the establishment. With this in mind, it is possible to read the singer who fails to benefit from the western duo’s heroics as a proxy for others who

218 are not represented. Most important, however, is the basic inadequacy of the western heroes for fixing troubles. Everybody supposedly gets help, however dubiously helpfiil that generic help may be, but the singer. Living simply but with little help and a fear of getting stepped on, Dylan enters the final verse an utterly comic outlaw: Well, lookit here buddy You want to be like me Pull out your six-shooter And rob every bank you can see Tell the judge I said it was all iight[.] He follows this last verse with a celebratory or sarcastic “Yeah!” Like “Rambling, Gambling Willie,” who is as much a warning as a hero worth emulating, Dylan’s final advice in “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is a parody of his own advice column. The progression of the song’s words of wisdom is finally pretty absurd: unable to get help for himself, Dylan says stay away from “ten cent women,” choose walking over a “sports car,” “don’t step on me,” and “rob every bank you can see.” Dylan toys with the idea of setting a bad example. On one hand, he anticipates and responds to the conservative charges of degeneracy that surrounded the rebel ancestry to which he has laid claim: “hillbilly music,” the blues, rock ‘n’ roll, James Dean, the politics of the left. On the other hand, especially in light of his singing “don’t step on me,” Dylan is uneasy about being an outlaw hero. Moreover, like the gambler Willie, the outlaw singer of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is potentially tainted by the financial implications of his advice. Prefaced by the singer’s anti-materialistic and anti­ establishment aversion to “five and ten cent women” and sports cars, the advice to rob a bank has a double irony. First, while robbery is clearly a part of the good outlaw tradition from the time of Robin Hood, the advice to take money is ironic in Dylan’s song after so much talk of the uselessness of material things, which include television heroes, commodified women, and flashy automobiles. Secondly, the advice in the last verse is ironic in light of the pattern of detachment advocated by the singer the whole song; it is as though the singer in the last verse is sarcastically saying, ‘Don’t be a follower but be like me.”

219 “Bob Dylan’s Blues” is the kind of text that critics of the western frequently ignore. However, the western imagery of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” merits discussion because of its use value. Marty Robbins’s gunfighter ballads may be “more” western, but the ineffectual western duo in the first verse and outlaw leader in the last verse of “Bob Dylan’s Blues” say as much or more about the potential uses of western imagery to corrunent on 1960s politics and culture. Drawn from the good outlaw tradition of “Pretty Boy Floyd” and “Jesse James,” the singer becomes an outlaw hero mocking his own leadership. These anxieties about leading and speaking for others are presented through humor, but the sociopolitical debates underpinning Dylan’s reluctant leadership are quite serious and caused a great deal of controversy in Dylan’s political life at the time. On December 13, 1963, Bob Dylan was awarded the Tom Paine award at a fund raiser hosted by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), an award that, in Robert Shelton’s words, was given to “some public figure who epitomized the good fight for freedom and equality” (200). At the ceremony, Dylan’s acceptance speech may have been a major first in a series of public fiascoes that have marked his musical and political career. Drunk and convoluted, the folk hero first wished he could look out at the audience and “see all kinds of faces with hair on their head.” Then, after insulting the elderly crowd, many of whom were veterans of the HUAC trials and the “black lists,” Dylan proclaimed: And it don’t help me one little bit to look back. I wish sometimes I could have come in here in the 1930s like my first idol—used to have an idol. Woody Guthrie, who came in the 1930s. [Here Shelton notes applause] But it has sure changed in the time Woody’s been here and the time I’ve been here. It’s not that easy anymore. People seem to have more fears ---- There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics. They has got nothing to do with it. I’m thinking about the general people and when they get hurt. Now I want to accept this . . . Tom Paine Award, from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. I want to accept it in my name, but I’m not really accepting it in my name and I’m not accepting it in any kind of group’s name, any Negro group of any other kind of group .... I was on the March on Washington up on the platform and I looked around at all the Negroes there and I didn't see any Negroes that looked like none of my friends. My friends don’t wear suits. My friends don’t have to wear any kind of thing to prove that they’re respectable Negroes. My friends are my friends, and they’re kind, gentle people if they’re my friends. And I’m not going to try to push nothing over. (qtd. in Shelton 200-201)

220 I quote the speech at length to note its general awkwardness. Dylan struggled to find and articulate his point Yet, there is much of interest here, from Dylan’s claim that he “used to have an idol” to his assertion that “It’s not that easy anymore,” from his equation of “politics” with triviality to his accusation that the March on Washington was an exercise in assimilationism. However awkward was Dylan’s speech, Shelton notes the crowd’s continual laughter and applause. It was not until Dylan sympathized with President Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald that the audience booed. Dylan stammered, “I’ll stand up and to get uncompromisable about it, which I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where—what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too—I saw some of myself in him” (201). Needless to say, the donations at the fund raiser were light (202). Feeling misunderstood and guilty for ruining a fund raiser, Dylan sent the ECLC an open letter, and his response to the ceremony was profiled by Nat Hentoff in 1964 for The New Yorker. In the profile, Dylan says that, obviously, he never intended to imply “it was a good thing Kennedy had been killed” (qtd. in Shelton 203). He adds: And then I started talking about friends of mine in Harlem—some of them junkies, all of them poor. And I said they need freedom as much as anybody else, and what’s anybody doing for them? The chairman was kicking my leg under the table and I told him, “Get out of here.”. .. I was supposed to be ... a nice cat. I was supposed to say, “I appreciate your award and I’m a great singer and I’m a great believer in liberals, and you buy my records and I’ll support your cause!” But I didn’t, so I wasn’t accepted that night.

Even as Dylan goes on to aiuiounce, “I’m never going to have anything to do with any political organization again in my life,” neither his speech nor his comments to Hentoff are apolitical so much as they are a political critique of his own political circle. In his critique of the March on Washington Dylan is not alone. Norman Harris writes, “For many, it is the crowning moment of the Civil Rights Movement, but for others, especially those young African-American women and men who had been directly involved in Civil Rights protests, the March on Washington, was, in Malcolm X’s words, a ‘Farce on Washington,”’ a “public-relations activity to gamer support for Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill” (32-33). There is some trath to Jim Miller’s claim that, at the March on 221 Washington, Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” rivaled “We Shall Overcome” as “the political anthem of the hour,” but Dylan’s critique of the March is no less political (60). As for Dylan’s anxiety about accepting the award in his name or the name of any group, this anxiety mirrors his larger anxiety about being the “voice” of “the movement” Activist Jerry Rubin’s litany of the teachers of “the movement” is informative: “Fugs / Dylan / Beatles / Ginsberg / mass media / hippies / students / fighting cops in Berkeley / blood on the draft records / sit-ins / jail” (qtd. in Scaduto 212). Dylan responds to this sort of pressure in the Hentoff profile when he notes, ‘I ’m not part of no Movement” (qtd. in Shelton 202). His music responds to this pressure as well, as we have seen through the heroes in his songs, which critique the limitations of heroic models but are also marked by a great deal of evasion. Mostly, Dylan fears organization. Dylan’s comments about the self-satisfaction of the “liberals” in the ECLC, some of them more radical and active than Dylan himself, probably jibe with the comments of hundreds of politicos in hundreds of basements, student centers, parks, and jails of the 1960s and periods before and after Dylan’s time. His distancing himself from the coat-and-tie crowd may indicate a shift from the Old Left permanently stunted by McCarthyism to a New Left bom, according to historian Paul Lyons, in “the civil rights revolution” (57). But Dylan’s trepidation about groups like the ECLC also exemplifies the common assumption, part accurate and part erroneous, that bureaucracy stifles political change, an assumption that has always had activist groups keeping a close eye over their mailing budget and the spending habits of their leaders. This fear of organization is infinitely problematic in political terms. While a little iconoclasm is healthy on any committee, cynicism and apathy lurk behind Dylan’s phobic anti-leadership. If Dylan’s political roots are leftist, his personality has less to do with Karl Marx than with Groucho Marx’s proclamation to never belong to any club that would have him as a member. Dylan’s anxieties about leadership are self-deprecating in much the same way: Who am I to speak for you? If I robbed a bank, would you rob one too? Uneasy about the responsibility of leadership, Dylan also fears stasis. Bob Dylan, like Woody Guthrie, embodies transience. Guthrie, like many blues and country singers of popular and folk tradition, lived the “Hard Travelin’” lifestyle he sang about. He

222 hopped trains, fled the Dust Bowl, and traveled fr^om migrant camp to migrant camp singing his songs. He was a transient, writing and singing songs about transients for transients. In Dylan’s case this transience has meant a frequent political and generic jumping of ship. From the Civil Rights and pacifist sympathies of the New York folk revivalists to rumored flirtations with Black militants and radical Zionists to Christian fundamentalism, Dylan’s politics have been flighty if not inconsistent with historical trends. Artistically, Dylan has shed generic labels more quickly than the press could create them: folkie, folk-rock musician, country-rock musician, singer-songwriter, gospel musician, etcetera. Guthrie wore many generic caps as well. His repertoire was broad, eventually including union songs, cowboy songs, talking blues songs, topical songs, anthems, children’s songs, protest songs, and ballads about “Okie” and Mexican migrants, though these categories overlap. Likewise, Guthrie has been accused of abandoning his more radical listenership when he wrote and recorded “Nationalistic Anthems” for the Bonneville Power Administration, a New Deal project, in the 1940s (Hampton 132). Nonetheless, Dylan’s transformations have been noteworthy for the conflict they have caused.

ELECTRIC OUTLAW OR ROCK ‘N’ ROLL JUDAS, 1965-1966

Particularly noteworthy in Dylan’s Protean career is his turn to electric music in the mid-1960s. The electric music on Bringing It All Back Home. High wav 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde on Blonde (1966) prompted a reappraisal of Dylan’s musical and political value to the Greenwich Village folk scene and to the left-wing activism of the folk song revival. The effects of electricity on Dylan’s music and the effects of Dylan’s turn to rock ‘n’ roll on popular culture have become part of both academic and popular discussions of the music of the 1960s. In 1998 Columbia officially released the famous Free Trades concert from Manchester, England,1966, honoring this famous bootleg’s long-standing misnomer “The Royal Albert Hall Concert.” This is one of many shows in 1965 and 1966 where Dylan’s electric set, what Anthony Scaduto jokingly calls “music for teenyboppers,” 223 was booed by folk purists who associated rock ‘n’ roll with counterrevolutionary mass culture (245). The heckling started when Dylan plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25,1965, continued through many of the subsequent shows in the United States and Australia, and, by the Free Trades show in May of 1966, had reached aggressive extremes. At Free Trades, one crowd member screamed the epithet “Judas!” to which Dylan replied, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.” Then, Dylan turned to the band shouting, “Play fucking loud!” In an era that saw a staggering number of political assassinations—Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr.—one British audience member’s bitter assertion that Dylan “wants shooting” speaks volumes about “fan” reaction to the folk hero’s electric assault.^^ Whatever the initial controversy surrounding Dylan’s electric music, this music helped politicize rock music and refute the authenticity politics of the folk revival. As if cursed to celebrity, the music industry’s most reluctant heroic leader continued to lead; Dylan’s angry disownership of the folk scene inspired an explosive cocktail of rock ‘n’ roll, politics, and counterculture that would develop on the west coast and in Great Britain. In typical form, Dylan was already uneasy about the emerging west-coast counterculture growing around rock ‘n’ roll. And as Dylan’s western imagery addressed his own political rock ‘n’ roll consciousness he also used western imagery to imply dissatisfaction with the counterculture’s Califomia dreamin’. In a brief but unusually thorough account of twentieth-century western American songs, Richard Aquila describes the “new duality” with which western images enter 1960s and 1970s music: To be sure, the more traditional images of the mythic West were still there. Pop and rock music continued to deal with exotic western landscapes, cowboys, Indians, and other romantic western characters, and the West was still portrayed as a source of happiness, freedom, and opportunity. Nonetheless, traditional western songs were joined by newer songs that either challenged the mythic West or used traditional western images in new ways to critique American society and culture. (199)

The audience member who growls that Dylan “wants shooting” was captured on film for the documentary Eat the Document, originally scheduled for the ABC-TV show Sta^e 67. The film, far too avant-garde for 1960s television, has been bootlegged and infrequently turns up at museums and academic venues (Shelton 366). 224 Aquila notes the utopian possibilities of the West in Beach Boys songs from “Surfin’ U.S.A." (1963) to “Do It Again” (1968), and he shows how hits like the Mamas and the Papas’s “million-seller ‘California Dreamin’” (1966) reinforced the notion that California was the land of milk and honey” (197-200). Conversely, Aquila also explores the underside of the myth of California as paradise, an underside found in songs like Dion’s “Sanctuary” (1971) and the Eagle’s “Hotel Califomia” (1976). This dystopian Califomia is joined by other bleak visions of the West. Seventies songs by Bruce Springsteen show a dangerous West and 1960s and 1970s songs by Cree folk musician Buffy Sainte-Marie, Sioux musician Floyd Westerman, and Neil Young indicate an increasing recognition in popular music that European American fantasies about the West have fueled atrocities against American Indians (202-205). While Aquila locates this new western duality mostly in the 1970s music of Dion, the Eagles, Springsteen, Westerman, and Young, there were plenty of bleak and revisionist images of the West in the folk music of the early 1960s, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s music being one example and Dylan’s being another. Dylan’s uru^eleased “Califomia” is an example of this earlier revisionism. According to Clinton Heylin, “Califomia” was recorded during a session for Bringing it All Back Home (1965), and the song is revisionist in its own right, predating later critiques of the mid-1960s move west (33). “Califomia” begins:

San Francisco’s fine. You sure get lots of sun. San Francisco is fine. You sure get lots of sun. But I’m used to four seasons, California’s got but one. (183) Admittedly, the revisionism is modest, but “Califomia” shows dissatisfaction with popular music’s west-coast fixation just as many of Dylan’s New York cronies were moving to join the west-coast Beats in the then-young Haight-Ashbury scene. Predating “Hotel Califomia” by eleven years and Dion’s “Sanctuary” by seven, “California” resists the utopian West of the late 1960s right as the exodus west is beginning. This is fitting since

225 the duality of Dylan’s vision combines not only the celebration and critique of the West that Aquila’s term suggests but also an inclination to use western imagery for the purposes of critiquing the idea of a movement itself and Dylan’s heroic relationship to it. Like Guthrie, who tells Alan Lomax that he grew up in the same area as Pretty Boy Floyd, Dylan’s western heroes are intertwined with his own persona, hence titles like “Bob Dylan’s Blues.” Dylan’s relationship to transformations in the folk and popular communities of his era are mediated through a hero type that is often evasive and suspect. “California” becomes a prime example of the collusion of westem imagery and the imagery surrounding Dylan’s mid-1960s persona as the singer continues: Well, I got my dark sunglasses, I got for good luck my black tooth. I got my dark sunglasses. And for good luck I got my black tooth. Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’, I just might tell you the truth. This is the final verse of “California,” and the only verse that makes it into the rewrite “Outlaw Blues.” The “dark sunglasses” shield the singer firom the California sun, but they are also a celebrity amulet. Once the singer gets this mojo working, he is protected from the tedious questions of reporters and hangers on. Insulated by his glasses, his standoffishness may be a blessing for inquisitors; it may just be what saves them firom the fate of the ECLC who were subjected instead to “the truth.” In “California,” Dylan’s singing persona is a modem celebrity outlaw, armed with sunglasses and already evading the countercultural exodus west. But Dylan’s hero is also still an electric outlaw, busy exploring new political possibilities in rock ‘n’ roll and getting the final drop on the folk community. “Outlaw Blues,” from the electric side of Bringing It All Back Home (1965) and a rewrite of “Califomizi,” is one of many songs that comment directly on the electric transformation, its political implications, and Dylan’s fear of leadership. Like “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” the verses of “Outlaw Blues” form a series of loosely related observations

226 and scenarios, formally consistent with non-ballad blues structures. Furthermore, like “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” the “Outlaw Blues” image of the westem hero comments directly on Dylan’s career and heroic leadership while defining a rock ‘n’ roll politics. In “Outlaw Blues,” the dark sunglasses verse is the forth of five. After threatening to tell the truth, Dylan sings the last verse: I got a woman in Jackson, I ain’t gonna say her name. I got a woman in Jackson, I ain’t gonna say her name. She’s a brown-skin woman, but I Love her just the same. (168)

“Outlaw Blues” is in the spirit of blues singer Alberta Hunter’s “You Can’t Tell a Difference After Dark” and finds more recent precedent in Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” while directly preceding the Rolling Stone’s “Brown Sugar.” Its interest in racial miscegenation is less a 1960s phenomenon than a consistent reality, fear, and fantasy miming to the core of American culture and its indigenous arts. However, that this verse follows a threat to tell “the truth” indicates a definite political valance in the song, a deliberate threat to the politics of segregation. In this way “Outlaw Blues” is political in a sense indebted to the Civil Rights politics surrounding Dylan’s early apprenticeships. At the same time the song exploits interracial sexuality in the typical spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. As Dylan was accused of abandoning political commitment by plugging in, electricity being seen as synonymous with mass culture in the minds of many folkies, songs like “Outlaw Blues” find an electric politics that would see its late 1960s zenith with artists like Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis. There is an anti-racist politics in “Outlaw Blues,” but the song also contains much of Dylan’s evasiveness. The refusal to tell the name of the woman in Jackson is one example. Dylan avoided claiming the Tom Paine award in his name or the name of any group, and the woman in Jackson of “Outlaw Blues” is afforded equal anonymity. But here Dylan also reveals a tendency to posit others not served by American society or progressive movements as accomplices in his escape, a tendency that either reveals his actual commitment or serves as a rhetorical device legitimizing his evasion.

227 In “Outlaw Blues,” California is traded in for an “Australian mountain range,” where Dylan wishes to be, not for any specific reason but just to keep moving: “I got no reason to be there, but I / Imagine it would be some kind of change.” He fantasizes about another frontier, creating new movements as he evades old ones, but he also anticipates accusations of betrayal from the folk crowd, and he does so through a reference to Bob Ford’s killing of Jesse James: Ain’t gonna hang no picture. Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame. Ain’t gonna hang no picture. Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame. Well, I m i^ t look like Robert Ford But I feel just like a Jesse James. Woody Guthrie, on his 1940 Library of Congress Recordings, compares the “dirty cowards” who killed Pretty Boy Floyd and Jesse James to Judas. Judas is often presented as an unflattering character, so it is fitting that the allusion to Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ is utterly two-dimentional in Guthrie’s account of the deaths of good outlaws. In Guthrie’s account, these outlaws are heroes with a cause, and their murders represent a great human loss and a betrayal of the cause. In the music of Bob Dylan, “Judas” is an epithet reserved for war mongers, as in “Masters of War” (1963) where, “like Judas of old,” armchair warriors “lie and deceive” (56). Robert Ford, the Judas in “Outlaw Blues,” is closer to Guthrie’s version of the traitor than to that in “Masters of War,” but Bob Dylan uses the betrayed outlaw to different ends than Guthrie did, mobilizing the theme of betrayal at the heart of James’s murder in his own defense. Dylan recognizes that he is seen as the traitor, Robert Ford, but he tums the tables and finally remasks himself as the one betrayed, the outlaw hero Jesse James. In the song “Jesse James,” which Dylan performed and recorded as early as 1961, Jesse is shot while hanging a picture (Heylin 1). Depending on the singer’s or listener’s interpretations, the shooting could be a warning against the dangers of domesticity for an outlaw, or it could be a warning that there is no escape from a life of outlawry. Either way, settling down seems incompatible with the outlaw image. In Dylan’s “Outlaw Blues,” the refusal to hang a picture could be an anticipation of betrayal, a refusal to settle, or both. Likewise, when a lyricist as frequently cinematic as Dylan refuses to hang a picture, it can be read reflexively,

228 as a sign of artistic evasiveness. The hero in “Outlaw Blues” plays off of the Guthrie model, but this hero serves Dylan in complicated ways. That Dylan’s singer “might look like Robert Ford” indicates his acknowledgement or even paranoia that, to many. Bob Dylan is an artistic and political traitor. Conversely, by reclaiming himself as Jesse James, Dylan redefines “the cause” and what it means to betray it He sets himself up as an outlaw hero in a tradition where good outlaws are victims of circumstance. Neither “Bob Dylan’s Blues” nor “Outlaw Blues” are ballads. Each has narrative elements in its individual verses, but both define themselves as “blues” and operate not as blues ballads but as blues with loosely linear series of first-person observations and scenarios. With “John Wesley Harding” Dylan returns to the ballad and, seemingly, to a celebration of the good outlaw that mirrors “Pretty Boy Floyd” more than any of his other songs. But if Dylan’s John Weslev Harding represents a return to “folk” music, Dylan’s choice of the outlaw John Wesley Hardin as a namesake for his song carries with it a bleak subtext complicating the effectiveness of the westem hero for representing 1960s racial politics and complicating further Dylan’s attitude towards political commitment.

“DRIFTER’S ESCAPE”: BOB DYLAN’S AGRARIAN SABBATICAL, 1966-1967

Describing Bob Dylan’s December 1967 release of John Weslev Harding. Clinton Heylin writes, “After eighteen months of quietude Dylan deliberately devised a muted return to the public arena?” (69-70). These “eighteen months of quietude” began with a July 1966 motorcycle accident. Near-fatal by some accounts, the accident nonetheless provided a reprieve from mounting contractual obligations. Bob Dylan had temporarily escaped the spotlight, recovering during a long sabbatical in agrarian Woodstock where he recorded the widely-bootlegged “basement tapes” with the Hawks, a.k.a.. The Band (Scaduto 282-284). During Dylan’s absence from official recording, the musical and political landscape changed. Musically, Monterey set a new precedent for festivals, the Beatles redefined production with Set. Pepper’s Lonelv Hearts Club Band (1967), Jimi

229 Hendrix found nuance in noise and velocity, and the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco reached the mainstream through Time (July 1967) while continuing to support a thriving “psychedelic” scene of 500 to 1500 Bay Area bands (Anderson 95; Perry 368). Politically, the Summer of Love had come and gone, “Black Power” became a popular slogan, MuhammadAli publicly evaded the draft, antiwar activists marched on the Pentagon, and numerous campuses and cities erupted in protests and violence (Harris 42- 45; Anderson 85-86,98-99). It is in the context of this musical and political change that John Wesley Harding seems “muted.” It is muted in its restrained production, its ostensibly simple moral lessons, and its terse lyrical style. However, Dylan’s “muted return to the public arena” is by no means artistically modest or apolitical. If anything, the muted quality of John Weslev Harding is a rhetorically sophisticated anticipation of fan response and critical interpretation. In the album’s liner notes, a number of ambiguous characters ponder interpretation. In the notes, “three kings” seek and find “Frank,” telling him that “Mr. Dylan has come out with a new record. This record of course features none but his own songs and we understand that you’re the key” fLvrics 265-266). The kings ask to “go in,” i.e., experience, the record only far enough that they can say they have “been there”; they fear going in “too far.” Heeding their superficial wish, Frank responds with manic gesticulations culminating in his putting his fist through plate glass. After the kings leave, Vera asks Frank, “Why didn’t you just tell them you were a moderate man and leave it at that instead of goosing yourself all over the room?” (266). Frank’s antics are for tourists. His show conceals a “moderate man,” a simple response to the excesses of psychedelia and the turmoil of late 1960s America. Nevertheless, if the liner notes indicate that moderation is “the key” to John Weslev Harding, the album’s dramatis personae are often larger-than- life, mythical. And at the heart of this mythic quality is the album’s westem imagery, beginning with the its opening song “John Wesley Harding” and closing with the optimistic country tune ‘T’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” Critics often read the album John Weslev Harding as a return to a certain kind of folk song. Few would argue that the album is a return to the same folk revival community Dylan had been disavowing for years, but it is fitting that John Weslev Harding was cut 230 and released only shortly after the death of Dylan’s hero. Woody Guthrie (Spitz 390). Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding” resembles the historical Wes Hardin in some ways, but Dylan’s Harding is equally another alias for Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd. This is evident in the song’s first verse: John Wesley Harding Was a fiiend to the poor. He trav’led with a gun in every hand. All along the countryside. He opened many a door. But he was never known To hurt an honest man. (249) Instead of singing “a gun in each hand” or “guns in both hands,” Dylan chooses “a gun in every hand,” some folk hyperbole recalling the rumor that Pretty Boy Floyd carried “three guns in each hand and a whole bunch more in his pocket.” At the same time, the use of multiple guns is consistent with Wes Hardin’s exploits as well, Hardin firing with both guns in many of his numerous gunfights. Therefore, Dylan’s hero claims a source in both Floyd and Hardin simultaneously. A historian of outlawry might not find this mixture unusual. With the oral transmission in folk culture, the tomes of mythology published in dime novels and dubiously factual accounts, and a hip-deep flood of fictionalized celluloid as their PR, westem heroes’ stories have often overlapped, yielding purported showdowns between frontier characters who never met and often attributing credit where credit is not historically due. Nonetheless, Dylan’s particular mixture of Floyd and Hardin leads to overt contradictions. Ostensibly, John Wesley Harding is one of Dylan’s most sympathetic westem characters. This sympathy is the product of deliberately minimal description and the overwhelming legacy of Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd,” which many folk music fans and performers would have read as a source for the song despite its also obvious namesake. However, outrageous contradictions arise when sympathy for this “good” outlaw is also attached, by association, to the historical Hardin. These contradictions stem from basic incompatibilities in the legends of Floyd and Hardin. Noting that Harding “opened many a door” without ever hurting “an honest man,” puts Dylan’s hero firmly in the camp of Pretty Boy. A social bandit in the Robin Hood

231 mold, Dylan’s Harding is a “friend to the poor.” However, the real Wes Hardin is not famous for banditry. Describing his gun-in-each-hand style, historian Leon Metz (1996) writes; For the second time, Hardin claimed to have performed the so-called Border Roll, often known as the Road Agent Spin [what Nordyke calls the “road agent’s roll”], and although this was a stunt where Hardin practically had a patent, the name was deceiving. A Road Agent was someone who robbed travelers, especially in stagecoaches. That wasn’t Hardin. (75) If Wes Hardin was a regional hero in Texas, it was not for being a bandit. Moreover, Wes was hardly a “friend to the poor” in any sense resembling Pretty Boy Floyd’s 1930s proletariat heroism. Like Floyd and most of Abrahams’s good outlaws, accounts frequently present Hardin as a victim of circumstance, an outlaw in self-defense, but Hardin’s kill-rate is high enough to render such claims suspicious at best. Recent histories are cautious about how many deaths they attribute to Hardin, but the numbers are still very high. For example, Metz suggests that Hardin killed “as few as twenty and as many as fifty” (ix). An unusual set of circumstances would have to exist for all of these killings to be self-defense. Outlaws and gunfighters were often victims of celebrity, drawing in “fans” looking to make a name for themselves by killing these heroes, and, in Hardin’s case, attracting a number of violent confrontations with the law, but this downward spiral of violence only partly accounts for the term “self-defense” when used to describe Wes Hardin, since this term had a significance in the Reconstruction South mediated by racism and regionalism. In Hardin’s South, self-defense against Reconstructionist laws enforced by the North meant institutionalized racism and racist vigilantism. The word “self-defense” served as a euphemism for an epidemic of lynchings and other forms of violence against African Americans that reached genocidal proportions throughout the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries. Lewis Nordyke’s (1957) history of Hardin is particularly interesting since it represents a history to which 1960s listeners could have had access. His book also illustrates the pitfalls of representing Hardin in “objective” history. Nordyke describes Hardin’s Texas:

232 Before long, nearly every heinous crime committed against a Texan was attributed to occupying soldiers or to breed slaves; on the other hand, every act of outlawry against the military rule and the Negro people—and there were many—was blamed on former Confederate soldiers and letels in general, and conbision and insurrection remained in Texas. (29) He then goes on to describe the white South’s response to these conditions: In general, there were two ways in which Southern white men felt compelled to cope with the complex racial situation—the way of the outright rebels like Wes Hardin and Bill Longley, or the way of the men who donnW white robes and hoods and rode with their friends and neighbors in the Ku Klux Klan. Honest, sincere men made such rides only when some outrage occurred that could not be endured—for if the wearers were caught, or even the robe and hood found in a man’s home, hanging was certain. (48) According to Nordyke, it is from this racially and regionally charged environment that Wes Hardin emerged as “the most urueconstructed rebel and the most wanted man in Texas” ( 11). Nordyke’s account of the way in which racially and regionally charged misconceptions and accusations fanned the flames of “confusion and insurrection” in Reconstruction Texas may be partly accurate. But the balance with which he attempts to present these misconceptions and accusations in the first quotation becomes particularly disturbing when he goes on to talk about the “sincere men” who took part in the lynchings, castrations, burnings, and other forms of terrorism perpetrated during the night rides of the Ku Klux Klan. Nordyke less warns against scapegoating these men as somehow atypical than he situates the Klansmen as heroes in the good outlaw tradition, though these men are not “outright rebels” enough to fit the mold perfectly. Nordyke seems to recognize the potentially racist pitfalls of his history in the “Foreword,” written in 1956, when he distances historical retelling from Hardin’s time: “Perhaps the reader should also be reminded that passages on the Negro and the Indian and on the sectional bitterness in the United States reflect attitudes of that time and not of the present; like the frontier, and like life itself, these things are ever changing.” Nevertheless, his apology for history reads like a late 1950s version of D. W. Griffith’s “facsimiles” in The Birth of a Nation (19151 I do not mean to suggest that Bob Dylan read Nordyke’s history of Hardin, but I do choose a history prior to Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding” to dramatize the potential reception awaiting Dylan’s choice of outlaws. Hardin was a Southern outlaw in the

233 tradition of Jesse James, but Hardin’s image is even more intertwined with the racist ideology of the South following the Civil War. Hardin’s historically acknowledged killings are full of tales of African American state police officers and “arrogant” African American men who challenge Southern white authority. It is no mistake that Wes Hardin has seen less traffic in popular film and music than Jesse James or Billy the Kid, even though Hardin is one of the West’s most dramatic characters: a killer of many men, a family man, the son of a preacher, a lawyer, and, like Pat Garrett, his own biographer! Moreover, if Dylan may not have known the extent of Hardin’s moral ambiguity, 1960s reception of “John Wesley Harding” indicates that he should have. In a reprint of an “offbeat ‘review’” he wrote for Crawdaddv a few weeks after John Weslev Harding’s release, Paul Williams describes Dylan’s use of Wes Hardin as follows: So let’s run John Weslev Harding through the analysis mill and see if we can grind it down to oatmeal wretched enough to be universally palatable. All gazing at the same Waterloo Sunset. And how come nobody ever talks about M asson Avenue any more? Like, John Wesley Hardin at fifteen killed a nigger for being uppity, and kept up that kind of bullshit until 1878, when, foolish move or no, he got stuck in jail for sixteen years, missing his twenty-sixth throu^ his forty-first birthdays and the inaugurations of Grover Cleveland. Bob Dylan is nobody’s fool. He knows about John Wesley Hardin (and added the “g” to his name presumably to compensate for all the g’s he’s dropped from other words over the years). Don’t underestimate him, and he’ll scratch your back too. But dear landlord, this is a mighty intentional record. Intentional and accessible, and that’s a tricky combination. (26) The goal of grinding the album down to “oatmeal wretched enough to be universally palatable” mocks Williams’s effort, along with my effort, to account for Dylan’s “message.” Nevertheless, Williams notes the album’s evasive simplicity. This evasiveness is a constant antiacademic joke running through the album, and a joke typical of Dylan’s general celebration of uncertainty. This evasiveness also partly accounts for Dylan’s choice of Wes Hardin. Is Dylan’s choice of outlaws part of the first wave of 1960s backlash that would eventually create a society where Howard Stem’s sole talent, and lucrative talent at that, lies in violating the supposed conventions of “political correctness”? Perhaps so. For a man whose objection to the ECLC’s Tom Paine award was couched in the rhetoric of a less patronizing race politics to turn around and present Hardin as a hero is outright bizarre. More likely, however, “John Wesley Harding” makes good on the liner notes warning not to go into the album “too far” and lives up to 234 Williams’s anxiety about overinterpietation. Returning firom a sabbatical earned by nearly dying in an accident, Dylan’s most perverse bit of antiheroism for his eager audience is to set his hero and, of course, himself up as one of history’s great monsters. Whether the product of intention or reception, the racist joke implicit in John Weslev Harding is wrought with much of the same anxiety that marks Dylan’s use of westem heroes in “Rambling, Gambling Willie,” “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” and “Outlaw Blues.” The first verse of “John Wesley Harding” is finally as much about Bob Dylan as it is about Floyd or Hardin. Certainly, by 1967 Dylan had “opened many a door,” and Harding’s aversion to hurting “an honest man” mirrors the promise and threat to “tell you the truth” in “Outlaw Blues.” When Harding travels “with a gun in ev’ry hand,” those hands are as much the hands of potential Judases aimed at Harding as they are the hero’s. On the 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded Dylan’s epic “Brownsville Girl” makes direct reference to the film The Gunfighter (1950), where Gregory Peck plays an aging gunfighter haunted and hunted by his profession until he is killed by an upstart. The film’s didactic message is that westem heroism is a curse. “John Wesley Harding” hints at this curse while continuing a tongue-in-cheek celebration of Harding as an heir to “Pretty Boy Floyd”: Twas down in Chaynee County, A time they talk about. With his W y by his side He took a stand. And soon the situation there Was all but straightened out. For he was always known To lend a helping hand. Chaynee County approximates Shawnee, Oklahoma, where Pretty Boy Floyd killed a sheriff with a log chain for insulting his wife. But Dylan’s song inverts the incident, making the “lady by his side” less a damsel in distress than a source of strength. While femininity for a westem outlaw or any male westemer is often associated with the stasis of domesticity (in the case of Jesse James a potentially dangerous domesticity), femininity also offers shelter from the road, a central feature of Dylan’s mythology and the mythology of masculine heroism in general. Since Dylan’s album John Weslev Harding, like his subsequent country music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, marks the beginning of what 235 many Dylan biographers describe as a retreat into agrarian family life, it is uncertain just what “stand” Harding is taking “With his lady by his side.” For a gunfighter, lending “a helping hand” connotes using a gun, perhaps “a gun in ev’ry hand,” but Dylan’s second verse is guarded about the specifics of the incident it describes. Its ambiguity is the antithesis of the accounts that should attend any heroic deed. This incident is a “time they talk about,” but Dylan refuses to tell exactly what “they” say. The second verse of “John Wesley Harding” is finally evasive, but the third verse is about evasion: All across the telegraph His name it did resound. But no charge held against him Could they prove. And there was no man around Who could track or chain him down. He was never known To make a foolish move. Harding’s final victory is neither for a “starvin’ farmer” nor for a bitter South but rather for himself. As Bob Dylan flirts with the least heroic of outlaw heroes by choosing Wes Hardin, he simultaneously brags that “no charge held against him / Could they prove.” Substitute “radio” or “record” for “telegraph,” and the real name resounding becomes Bob Dylan, hero of the politics of evasion. The title song of John Weslev Harding sets the pace for the whole album. While the outlaw never returns explicitly, he is transformed into a series of wanderers and drifters, many of them failed prophets and involuntary heroes or even martyrs. The album’s second song, “As I Went Out One Morning,” has a first-person wanderer meeting a woman in chains and Tom Paine, a character whom Dylan critics cannot help but read as a nod to the Tom Paine award: As I went out one morning To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s, I spied the fairest damsel That ever did walk in chains. I offer’d her my hand. She took me by the arm. I knew that very instant. She meant to do me harm. (250)

236 The use of the word “that” instead of “who” to describe the “fairest damsel” may not be self-conscious objectification, since nonstandard usage is a common feature of Dylan’s music and verbal communication. There is, however, a sense that the damsel is less a person than a character type, a damsel in chains shackled also by convention. In Dylan’s song the contradictions that attend any romantic rescue are present, e.g., the oxymoronic but typical and essential “fairest damsel,” beautiful in her state of duress. The contradictions accumulate, the most obvious being that the chained damsel is a trap, an agent of danger feigning helplessness. Dylan’s is no more a feminist revision than a misogynistic fear recalling elements of Peckinpah; i.e., wander past but don’t stop or she will do you harm. But the ambiguity of Dylan’s sparse style opens up other possibilities. The fair damsel is beautiful, but she is also “fair” in another sense, far more “fair” than democratic hero Tom Paine himself: “Depart from me this moment,” I told her with my voice. Said she, “But I don’t want to,” Said I, “But you have no choice.” “I beg you, sit,” she pleaded From the comers of her mouth, “I will secretly accept you And together we’ll fly south.” The “south” to which the damsel and the singer will fly has inspired some muddled readings. Greil Marcus, for example, writes, I sometimes hear the song as a brief journey into American history; the singer out for a walk in the park, finding himself next to a statue of Tom Paine, and stumbling across an allegory: Tom Paine, symbol of freedom and revolt, co-opted into the role of Patriot by textbooks and statue committees, and now playing, as befits his role as Patriot, enforcer to a girl who runs for freedom—in chains, to the South, the source of vitality in America, in America’s music—away from Tom Paine. We have turned our history on its head; we have perverted our own myths .... (Riley 177-178) I’m not sure that celebrating the South constitutes history turned “on its head” or a perversion of myths. I’m not even certain what “south” means in the song; flying south might suggest South America as much as it suggests Alabama. Nonetheless, the reference to the south, to the narrator’s lending a helping “hand,” and to the lady’s loyalty all connect

237 to the lady by Harding’s side in the title track and to Vera in the liner notes. Like the woman in “John Wesley Harding,” the woman in “As I Went Out One Morning” vacillates between damsel and savior. In “As I Went Out One Morning,” the woman goes from damsel to savior by way of potential femme fatale; Just then Tom Paine, himself. Came ranning from across the field. Shouting at thus lovely girl And commanding her to yield. And as she was letting go her grip. Up Tom Paine did ran, ‘I ’m sorry, sir,” he said to me, ‘T’m sorry for what she’s done.” I think her danger is finally Tom Paine’s ruse, though mine might be a minority opinion. Robert Shelton writes, Tom Paine shines as a metaphor for fteethinking. He was, of course, the revolutionary writer for whom that 1963 civil liberties award was named. Dylan hints that Paine, who once proclaimed that his own mind was his church, would have been appalled to see libertarian ideas enchained by dogma. A traditional form is used here to move the story along, and to comment on the clash of contemporary values. The girl enchained is actually a dual reversal: Traditionally, fair damsels are the enslaved, not enslaver. (392) Shelton is astute in his assumption that the Tom Paine award incident indicates an opposition between Dylan’s assumptions about what it means to be freethinking and ECLC “dogma.” However, Shelton’s reading does not do enough to separate the supposedly credible Paine of history from the one in the song. Who in the song represents “dogma”? Is it the twisted image of Paine or the dangerous woman? Finally, one reading trusts the moral respectability of Tom Paine’s apology while suggesting that the damsel’s offer of acceptance and escape is a snare. But nothing in the song indicates that this is definitely the case. The Tom Paine of the song is a democratic hero who apologizes for his slave’s insubordinacy but makes no attempt to account for her subjugation. Tim Riley calls the historical Tom Paine an “outlaw joumalist,” but the self-satisfaction with which the song’s Tom Paine saves the narrator from the prisoner renders such heroism uncertain (177). “As I Went Out One Morning” could be about a veteran of the political fray warning the narrator

238 of its dangers, but the song is just as likely an indictment of a political hero so self-satisfied that he considers the enslaved damsel more an embarrassing liability than a cause for action. Dylan’s choice of image, the enslaved woman, is indebted to some knowledge of the women’s liberation movement, but Dylan’s insistence on using the female character to symbolize old patriarchal stereotypes like the damsel, the dangerous woman, and the protector illustrates a limited enlighterunent Women in Dylan’s songs suffer at the hands of oppression, even oppression in the egalitarian drag of Tom Paine, but “As I Went Out One Morning” finally uses enslavement of the female character not to challenge patriarchy so much as to challenge the hypocrisy of “the movement” Moreover, the song uses the woman’s offer to “fly south” as a potential escape. The wandering narrator of “As I Went Out One Morning” fits in nicely with the evasive Harding and, later, with the drifter of “Drifter’s Escape” fLvrics 258), insofar as all three find support and solace in female characters, and this support and solace reflects Dylan’s own escape to agrarian family values in the late 1960s. ‘Drifter’s Escape” begins with a typical Dylan desire to evade nasty accusations: “Oh, help me in my weakness,” I heard the drifter say. As they carried him from the courtroom And were taking him away. “My trip hasn’t been a pleasant one And my time it isn’t long. And I still do not know What is was that I’ve done wrong.” However, the song quickly offers the narrator some advocates: the “attendant and the nurse” who stand up to the mob threatening the drifter:

“Oh, stop that cursed jury,” Cried the attendant and the nurse, “The trial was bad enough. But this is ten times worse.” Just then a bolt of lightning Struck the courthouse out of shape. And while everybody knelt to pray The drifter did escape.

239 The allies in “Drifter’s Escape” are “the attendant and the nurse,” at least one a stereotypically feminine character. The song’s deus ex machina is lightning. The enemies are the mob, the law, and mysterious circumstances. Robert Shelton writes: The song recalls Hank Williams, the drifter being a victim of the music life nicknamed Luke the Drifter, whose lonesome chants have a similarly beseeching tone. Dylan’s retreat couldn’t blot out the outrage he’d heard the previous three years. The drifter is the Kafkaesque victim, offense unknown. Enter God with a bolt of lightning, making the persecutors cry while the drifter escapes. The lightning could well be that motorcycle [accident]. Dylan’s hatred of mob behavior was deep. After seeing the film The Ox-Bow Incident, he worked on a ballad about a lynching of an iimocent. (393) If Shelton is speculating at best by finding sources in Kafka or Hank Williams, his speculation illustrates an important point about the drifter in the song. Recalling the existential heroism of Joseph K in The Trial (1930) and the predicament of the falsely accused in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), any heroism in “Drifter’s Escape” is intertwined with victimization. While the hero is often a victim of circumstances, Dylan has finally moved even farther away from the heroism of Pretty Boy Floyd to a character more akin to Guthrie’s victims than to their heroic saviors. However, like “John Wesley Harding,” the drifter of “Drifter’s Escape” is not “foolish.” He takes advantage of the situation. Shelton’s comparison of the “bolt of lightning” to Dylan’s motorcycle accident cleverly points to the song’s reflexive nature. This, like so many of Dylan’s songs, is a meditation on celebrity. It is significant that the drifter escapes while the court is praying. The drifter’s persecution is a form of worship, and the lighming is less a necessary distraction than a displacement of the spotlight. The protests of the “attendant and the nurse” suggest alternatives to the persecution, but the “stand” the drifter takes with these characters by his side is really evasion. The “attendant and the nurse,” the “fairest damsel that ever did walk in chains,” and Harding’s “lady by his side” represent a series of feminine allies who are part of the drifter Dylan’s final escape. Dodging Bob Ford’s bullets, the outlaw is domesticated, a domestication that is, unsurprisingly, rife with westem imagery less dependent on the outlaw hero. Clinton Heylin states that the last two country songs on John Weslev Harding point toward his most thorough effort to make country music, Nashville Skvline n9691 (74). Heylin’s is probably the majority opinion. Many fans familiar with the trajectory of 240 Dylan’s career would say the same. “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” the last song on John Weslev Harding, is a Nashville love song with the singer working to get his “baby” to agree to a one-night stand. The album that opens with “John Wesley Harding,” cormoting Dylan’s debt to Guthrie while lionizing, albeit ironically, one of the West's most notoriously homicidal and racist outlaws, ends with the optimistic leisure of domestic entanglements: Kick your shoes off, do not fear. Bring that bottle over here. I’ll be your baby tonight The escape in ‘Til Be Your Baby Tonight” is hardly permanent The song is about a one- night stand. But the song points again to a musical and political hero’s attempt to disappear into domesticity and the solace of country music and imagery. Dylan’s turn to country reflected and influenced a larger turn toward country in late 1960s rock music, a country craze led by groups like The Band and The Byrds. However, if the growing interest in country music by musicians and groups associated with rock ‘n’ roll and the political counterculture represented a trend at the time, it was a politically complicated trend. As folkies, former folkies, and rock artists embraced country music, leading to alliances between artists like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, outlaw rebellion remained a common feature of the era’s music. But questions remain: Outlaw against what? Oppression or responsibility?

“WANTED MAN IN NASHVILLE”: THE POLITICS OF COUNTRY BOB, 1967-1970

On Johnnv Cash at San Ouentin Cl969). Cash includes the Dylan song “Wanted Man”: Wanted man in Albuquerque, wanted man in Syracuse, Wanted man in Tallahassee, wanted man in Baton Rouge, There’s somebody set to grab me anywhere that I might be And wherever you might look tonight, you might get a glimpse of me. (Lvrics 279)

241 A celebration of the musician’s many travels, the song also contains an evasiveness similar to Dylan’s music on John Wesley Harding. One imagines a concert poster designed to look like a wanted poster with a picture of either Cash or Dylan, fugitive kin. If “Wanted Man” uses the outlaw image to simultaneously celebrate and critique the rambling lifestyle of a musician, this outlaw song seems less overtly political than “John Wesley Harding”or “Bob Dylan’s Blues.” No veiled reference to “Pretty Boy Floyd,” though the song recalls Guthrie’s rambling lifestyle. No troubling celebration of a racist outlaw. No coimection of outlawry with leadership, as is the case with the Pied Piper of bank robbery in “Bob Dylan’s Blues.” “Wanted Man” does, however, suggest a fear of betrayal central to the Jesse James reference in “Outlaw Blues,” and “Wanted Man” is finally about Dylan shedding one artistic and political skin for another, for Dylan’s association with Johnny Cash and with country music in general would soon become one of his most controversial moves. In 1969 Cash joined Dylan on Nashville Skyline. Dylan’s popular but controversial “country” album. The album scored a hit with “Lay Lady Lay,” originally written for the film Midnight Cowbov (1969) (Heylin 74). But the album also represents a new level of disengagement from the leftist politics of Dylan’s musical adolescence. In order to understand Dylan’s turn to country music and its effect on his image, however, it is necessary to understand the politics or imagined politics of country music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Ed Ward describes the early 1970s popularity of Willie Nelson, a musician who would go on to lead the “outlaw movement” in country music, he begins to describe the political implications of a fusion of country and rock music. This fusion has existed since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll but saw a commercial revival in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Specifically, Ward describes an attempt to expand country music’s market to include rock fans and fans with liberal politics: In Austin [Willie Nelson] met Eddie Wilson, a former PR man for the Texas beer industry, who had rented a former National Guard armory and rechristened it Armadillo World Headquarters. Wilson knew that Willie Nelson, a closet liberal, was a hero to almost every political faction in town. He also figured that a Nelson concert would unite these factions, and so in July 1972 he tried out the idea of a country-rock concert, headlined by Nelson, at Ajmadillo World Headquarters. It was a wild success. (256) 242 No single event or person accounts for the political and generic transformations Ward describes, but Willie Nelson’s imprint on country music in general and on the outlaw style in particular is huge, and his ability to speak to country and rock audiences of various political persuasions is certainly part of his success. In describing Nelson’s success, however. Ward reveals a market made possible by political tensions in the 1960s that divided rock and country audiences. The term “liberal” is interesting when applied to Willie Nelson, not so much because it accurately describes Willie’s music but because applying the term to a country singer problematizes a facile 1960s analogy: rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm ‘n’ blues are to liberal politics what country music is to conservative politics. Of course, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are often too nebulous to describe anything beyond voting habits, always begging the question, “Liberal or conservative about what?” Social services? Civil Rights? Feminism? Drug laws? The Viemam War? Sexual preference? The American Indian Movement? Black Power? Religion? Free speech? These multiple facets of the 1960s political question indicate that a word like “liberal” may be provisional at best when applied to a person, downright unwieldy when applied to something as large as the country music industry, the rock music industry, or the “counterculture.” For example. Jay Stevens describes an incident on October 7, 1966 when “a delegation of hippies arrived at San Francisco’s City Hall” to protest a bill criminalizing LSD. Stevens writes: They were in the midst of this presentation, which was half loony theatre, half polemic, when a group of antiwar activists, led by Jerry Rubin, arrived to hold their own press conference. It was the Sixties Rohrschach: on one side of the Hall stood activists, in work boots and jeans, while across from them were these golden-robed hippies. And in between . . . in between the antagonism was palpable. (121) Historians continue to wrestle over the meaning of terms like “counterculture,” “the movement,” and the much-stereotyped “hippie.” More importantly, if historians can trace the word “hippie,” it is difficult to completely characterize the politics of the Haight- Ashbury counterculture or the rock music that was its soundtrack.^^ Stevens, for instance.

“Hippie” is a word supposedly borrowed from Norman Mailer’s term “hipster.” Journalist Michael Fallon uses the term in a September 1965 San Francisco Examiner article describing the exodus and subsequent costume change of North Beach Beats to Haight-Ashbury (Stevens 129-130). 243 notes the tension between the hippies and the activists to dramatize the complications inherent in ec zating rock ‘n’ roll counterculture with left-wing activism. The counterculture was hedonistic and apolitical in some ways. In other ways, it was a breeding ground of new ideas, alternative sexual lifestyles, mind-altering drugs, spiritual eclecticism, and non-traditional families. In this sense, the Haight-Ashbury scene and the late 1960s rock ‘n’ roll counterculture in general were political by their very nature, transforming the sociopolitical landscape simply by living differently. Recall Jerry Rubin’s aforementioned litany of the teachers of “the movement” as, “Fugs / Dylan / Beatles / Ginsberg / mass media / hippies / students / fighting cops in Berkeley / blood on the draft records / sit-ins / jail” (Scaduto 212). ff the antagonism between Rubin’s activists and the protesting hippies was palpable, his interest in “mass media,” rock ‘n’ roll, and “hippies” as teachers of political action is equally noteworthy. Part anti-social hedonists and apolitical isolationists, the rock ‘n’ roll countercultures of the late 1960s were nonetheless inextricably tied to politics, whether some countercultural types liked it or it. However uncomplicated it may seem, rock ‘n’ roll culture was perceived as liberal or left-wing by the late 1960s. Country music and the western provided the cultural and political backlash. For example, Don Siegel’s film Coogan’s Bluff (1969) stars Clint Eastwood as an Arizona lawman, in cowboy boots and hat. Coogan is an anachronism in the big city, arguing with a liberal parole officer (Susan Clark) and giving creepy urbanites an old fashioned beating. And the musical equivalent of Coogan is Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” (1970), a singer-persona who bashes the San Francisco hippie lifestyle and the anti-war movement and refuses to “smoke marijuana,” “make a party out of lovin’,” or “bum draft cards down on main street” Whether a right-wing anthem or a self­ professed “goof,” Haggard’s song drew fire from the left-wing counterculture, most notably in the form of Kinky Friedman’s parody “Asshole From El Paso” (McGee 300). Whatever Haggard’s intentions. President Nixon’s request to hear “Okie from Muskogee” from Johnny Cash during Cash’s April 1970 visit to the White House is worth noting (Orman 7). Haggard’s “The Fightin’ Side of Me” (1970) is another example of the “right- wing” tendency of country music. This rant against anti-war protesters joins Kris Kristofferson’s “Vietnam Blues” in registering a country music rebuttal to the anti-war

244 movement Furthermore, if country music in the late 1960s and early 1970s was earning a right-wing reputation, this reputation was also imposed by rock ‘n’ roll culture. For example, it is fitting that the Byrds' “Dmgstore Track Driving Man”—which opens “He’s a drugstore track driving man. He’s the head of the Ku KIux Klan”—is performed with all its country flavor at 1969’s Woodstock festival with a mocking dedication to then govemor of Califomia “Ronald Ray-Guns.” The problem with the liberal-rock/conservative-country opposition is that its truth is a testament to the success of its fantasy. The bulk of the songs on Billboard’s country, R&B, and Pop charts in the 1960s have very little to say explicitly about politics, and recent historians, like Paul Lyons, have noted that our discussions of 1960s politics often neglect to mention that the majority of Americans were politically middle of the road. It follows, then, that most country music in the late 1960s is more concerned with love than backlash. Moreover, the artists who wrote and performed the right-wing songs are often far more complicated than they appear. Kris Kristofferson is likely to sing an anti-protest song like “Vietnam Blues” in the same breath as he sings a song about tolerance and activism that compares hippies to Jesus. And Merle Haggard’s prison and fugitive songs, even with their moral lessons, are often in the rambling spirit of the 1960s counterculture.49 Finally, I would argue that Eddie Wilson’s plan to use “closet liberal” Willie Nelson to bridge the politically polarized music industry was actually bom in a combination of the assumed liberal-rock/conservative-country opposition and the very real subversion of that opposition that was already going on in the late 1960s in the music of Bob Dylan, The Band, The Byrds, and a number of San Francisco acts. Before Willie Nelson fled a career as a Nashville songwriter for a career as a top Austin musician in the early 1970s, Texas had produced 1960s musicians who would become mainstays in the hippie counterculture of San Francisco and would bring with them country styles. By the late 1960s countercultural heroine Janis Joplin and eclectic talent Doug Sahm had fled Texas for Califomia, “where drug laws were more liberal and the opportunities to record more abundant” (Ward 255). Sahm, who was steeped in the On a draft of this dissertation, Patrick Mullen adds, “But for every ‘Okie From Muskogee’ in [Haggard’s] repertoire, one can find many more populist songs-’Tulane Dust,’ ‘They’re Tearin’ the Labor Camp Down,’ ‘A Workin Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today,’ ‘My Own Kind of Hat,’ ‘Working Man Blues,’ and his own defense of inter-racial love, ‘Irma Jackson.”’ 245 Chicano and African American music of Texas, surely informed San Francisco’s amalgam of Eastem and American Indian spiritualiQr, politics, dmgs, and multi-etimic musical styles. And Joplin’s reputation as a no-nonsense female artist is cut from the cloth of blues legend Willie May “Big Mama’’ Thornton. Moreover, if the music of Joplin and Sahm draws on diverse sources, one of those sources is clearly country. In fact, one of Joplin’s most famous songs is Kris Kristofferson’s country song “Me and Bobby McGee.” Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” was released on the posthumous Pearl in 1971 (Evans 382). Kris Kristofferson’s was released the same year, and both versions were rereleased in 1991 on Kristofferson’s Singer/Songwriter, which, as its title suggests, is one disc of Kristofferson singing his own material and one of others singing his material (Coleman 409). The chorus of the Kristofferson song fits Joplin and the counterculture well: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. And nothing ain’t worth nothing, but it’s free. Feeling good was easy when Bobby sang the blues. Feeling good was good enough for me. Good enough for me and Bobby McGee. The celebratory tone afforded the lack of ambition in the second line is the counterculture’s political and apolitical nature in one economic aphorism. It is the battered indifference of children away from home, made possible by unprecedented growth in population, the middle class, and travel. Sixties historian Paul Lyons notes that in 1950, before the Highway Act of 1956,59 percent of Americans were car owners; by the 1980s there were seven cars per ten Americans (34-35). Lyons also notes that, between the mid-1930s and the early 1970s home ownership jumped from 44 percent to 63 percent (34). In the 1960s there were more homes to leave and more ways to leave them. And, with the Baby Boom of angst-ridden age, there were more young people. But the existentialist “nothing left to lose” of Kristofferson’s choms is not solely the product of a larger and more mobile youth culture. It is also the product of a romanticized asceticism of the road that has too many precedents in blues and country music to count. It is generic. It is the rambling lifestyle of the medicine show; the transience of the “Okie” and Mexican migrants of Guthrie’s 1930s; the road that killed Bessie Smith, Hank Williams, and Eric Dolphy; the road that took Buddy Holly, Ritchie 246 Valens, and the Big Hopper in one bright flash. Kristofferson’s bittersweet tribute to the road is part of an American musical genre that crosses multiple categories of American music, from Ma Rainey’s “Black Bottom” to Robert Johnson and the Devil at the crossroads, Jimmie Rodgers waiting for a train, and Woody Guthrie’s “hard travelin’.” Kristofferson’s song is also part of a reflexive romance the late 1960s and early 1970s had with the canon of road-weary folks I have been compiling. Don McCIean’s number one hit “American Pie” (1972) starts with the the day Holly, Valens, the Hopper, and “the music died.” It then moves on to reference Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” the motorcycle accident that made Bob Dylan the “jester on the sideline in a cast,” the “Helter Skelter” Charles Manson stole from the Beatles and U2 tried to steal back, and the “moss” that “grows fat on a rolling stone,” be it Muddy Waters’s, Bob Dylan’s, or Mick and Keith’s.^® That Kristofferson’s song treats ‘Treedom” as “nothing left to lose” is both optimistic and pessimistic, the silver lining of 1960s need and the vacuum left by 1960s iconoclasm. Critics who ask if Kristofferson’s is a romantic or anti-romantic vision of the road might miss the point. The anti-romance is part of the romance. The song romanticizes the counterculture’s ability to see through the romance, to live in motion without destination. This is textbook existentialism, Sisyphus pushing the rock for the process instead of the product. However, this chorus is not entirely nihilistic about genre or politics. As an anthem to 1960s politics, the chorus’s “good enough for me and Bobby McGee” celebrates “free love,” and the gender unspecific “Bobby” refuses to define what kind of “love” and between whom. The song’s “nothing left to lose” critiques the failures of the decade of “freedom rides” and “freedom marches” and “free love,” but it also suggests eamed loss. Finally, if “Me and Bobby McGee” is generically and politically

A recent VHl viewers poll named McCIean’s song one of rock’s ten best, an ironic choice in that McCIean’s song eulogizes rock’s demise. VHl viewers’ exclusion of Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day,” Valen’s “La Bamba,” and the Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace,” in favor of McCIean’s song should be utterly annoying to anyone who really cares about the music the song eulogizes, but it shows the power of the reflexive road song.

247 reflexive, it is also a reflexive tribute to the profession of music. Sexual and pharmaceutical double entendre of “feeling good” with Bobby aside, remember that “Bobby plays the blues.”5i The precedent aside, the outlawry of outlaw country is more than a market or an attitude. Even if a bit redundant, it is a fusion of politics and a fusion of styles. Country with rock ‘n’ roll attitude. Outlaw gang leader Willie Nelson’s voice was not allowed to be the voice of 1960s Nashville. Millions of Americans thinking of “Crazy” as a Patsy Cline song attests to Cline’s overwhelming talent and Nelson’s unmarketability in 1960s Nashville. Nelson is a country outsider. Outlaw second in command Waylon Jennings was a rocker with Buddy Holly. He gave up his seat on that doomed plane. He beat the curse of the road once and entered country music an outlaw against genre and fate. At the 1970 Isle of Wight show, the sequel to the United Kingdom’s 1969 response to Woodstock, Kris Kristofferson’s country band was booed by an audience already angry that the show’s promoters refused to let them in for free. The people in charge of the show were either misunderstood pragmatists or sinister capitalists. The angry mob scaling and toppling the festival’s sheet-metal walls were either Marxist’s or freeloaders. It all depends on whom you ask.^2 Willie, Waylon, and Kris were liminal in a generic sense. Since many still equated the country-rock split with a conservative-liberal split, a split I have shown to be complicated, if not crumbling, throughout the late 1960s, it followed that they were liminal in a political sense as well.

The word “blues” is always curious when attached to Anglo folk and country songs, be it Guthrie’s “Worried Blues” (1940) or Haggard’s “Working Man Blues” (1969), but the centrality of the African American blues and jazz traditions to country’s most important artists is practically beyond debate; Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Dock Boggs, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Charlie Rich, and Willie Nelson, to name a few, all draw on the blues and/or Jazz tradition. Murray Learner, frlmmaking veteran of the Newport Folk Festival, shot and edited this incident into the documentary Isle of Wight. The film cuts out the bulk of Miles Davis’s performance, a decision that exemplifies the historical erasure of some of the most important fusion experiments in post-war popular music. Unable to play in all the negative vibes, Joni Mitchell loses her cool, chastises the audience for belittling music, and then launches into a typically stunning display o f musical prowess. The reason for Kristofferson’s being booed is complicated by the general feeling o f hatred in the air. He is the closest thing the concert has to a country singer, which may equate with the closest thing the concert has to a conservative.

248 Perhaps the most recent testament to the enduring political ambiguities of the late 1960s and early 1970s fusion of country and rock occurred at the 1992 Madison Square Garden tribute to Bob Dylan, which Neil Young called “Bobfest.” At the tribute concert, left-wing Irish activist and musician Sinead O’Cormor was booed for her outspokenness and iconoclasm. O’Connor had recently been in the press for ripping up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live. Having the bad taste to bring real iconoclasm to a television show that is America’s favorite source of fake iconoclasm cost O’Connor the chance to sing “I Believe In You,” a love song to Christ from Dylan’s controversial bom-again phase that contains the lines; They’d like to drive me from this town. They don’t want me around ‘Cause I believe in you. O’Connor, a devout Christian who became a priest in a branch of the Catholic church that honors the Vatican without reciprocation, instead launched into an a Capella version of Bob Marley’s “War,” proclaiming that, in a world governed by philosophies of superiority and inferiority, “Everything is war!” In an act both sympathetic and paternalistic, which is to say politically ambiguous as always, Kris BCristofferson came out on stage to comfort O’Connor. She cried on his shoulder. Later, she and Willie Nelson made plans to record together. Her song with Willie made his album, but “War” never made it on the “Bobfest” soundtrack.^3 Given the generic and political ambiguities I have been discussing, it is perfect and predictable that the two established artists to most publicly support O’Connor are country artists, and outlaw movement mainstays at that. O’Connor’s being booed reveals an audience unaware of the unwritten rule that the only person who gets booed at a Dylan concert is Bob Dylan, and it is fitting that the ugly incident would involve Dylan’s old country pals, for Dylan’s late 1960s conversion to country music recalls the generic and political controversy surrounding his conversion to rock ‘n’ roll. Anthony Scaduto writes: To see Dylan jump into this brand of apple pie wholesomeness struck many as a sellout For years he had transformed original country sources into music hard as city asphalt, and now it seemed like the complete turnabout.

The O’Connor fiasco can be rented on the video Bob Dvlan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration. (1993). 249 “With that record Bobby’s neck went from a size 14 to a size 16, and got very red,” one old friend says. For country is the music of the South, the very bigoted South, redneck music. (298) Understanding the disturbing irony of Dylan’s choice of Wes Hardin requires some sense of history. Understanding the implications of his late 1960s country music requires little more than the common late 1960s equation of country with “redneck” and “bigot.” Scaduto, writing only two years after the release of Nashville Skyline, knew this quite well. Dylan surely knew this too. There is nothing explicitly bigoted about Dylan’s “country” music, but the genre choice itself seems to be enough. However, most of the music of Dylan’s domestic- agrarian phase directly following Nashville Skvline is less conservative than apolitical, using western motifs to express satisfaction over his successful evasion of commercial and political pressures. In “Sign on the Window,” from the experimental but largely domestic and agrarian album New Morning (19701. Dylan sings: Build me a cabin in Utah, Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout. Have a bunch of kids who call me “Pa,” That must be what it’s all about. That must be what it’s all about. (293) Dylan’s music on New Morning fits in nicely with the confessional music of the 1970s singer-songwriters, and if this similarity need not mean this music is apolitical, lines like the preceding have more to do the escapism of John Denver’s Colorado songs—a frightening thought—than with any explicit politics. Fittingly, there is little room in this western landscape for the outlaw, lady by his side or not. In fact, the outlaw’s basic inconsistency with the idea of settling down presents a threat to the “moderate man” finally realized in 1969 and 1970. The “moderate man” image, however, is not without its dark side. The line “That must be what it’s all about” from “Sign on the Window” can be heard as speculation as easily as it can be heard as a conclusion. In a similar song from New Morning. Dylan actually implies that he knows his domestic-agrarian rebirth is a fantasy. “Time Passes Slowly” begins:

250 Time passes slowly up here in the mountains. We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains. Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream. Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream. (287) It is a good “dream” but, like all dreams, perhaps temporary: Time passes slowly up here in the daylight. We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right. Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day. Time passes slowly and fades away. The domestic-agrarian Dylan is happy, disengaged from the responsibilities that once came with being a musician. Time “fades away.” Perfiaps time no longer matters, and this too is a luxury. But pe±aps this “time” away from celebrity is fleeting, another Dylan stage that will pass. Perhaps the lugubriousness of his domestic-agrarian fantasy even has him restless. Should he have to “try so hard to stay right”? The country music at the end of John Weslev Harding and the country music on Nashville Skvline. along with New Morning’s domestic-agrarian bliss, separated Dylan from another part of his fan base and the political commitments those fans might demand. While Dylan’s electric music and his divorce from the early 1960s revivalists might have helped form the rock ‘n’ roll counterculture of late 1960s scenes like Haight-Ashbury, with its contradictory political detachment and activism, Dylan never fully participated in any of the major musical events of that culture. While Bob Dylan played a countrified set at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969, he skipped both Monterey and Woodstock. Furthermore, his output of studio work dropped while his concert appearances practically ceased. However, Dylan’s quest to become a “moderate man” contained the same ambivalence with which Dylan once sang protest songs, and 1971, fittingly, saw Dylan return to a celebration of the rebel.

251 URBAN BADMAN; BEYOND DYLAN’S WESTERN HEROES

In 1971 Dylan was not singing about long-dead or fictitious western outlaws but rather a martyr of the Black Panthers, George Jackson. Jackson was killed in prison in 1971 “while allegedly trying to escape,” and he is important not only as a “political prisoner” who “entered the prison system at the age of 15 to serve a sentence of one year to life for stealing $70” but also as the writer of Soledad Brother. The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970) (Harris 88-89). Regarded as a brief and suspicious return to “protest,” “George Jackson” was recorded in November of 1971 along with the sweet country song “Wallflower,” about a wallflower at a dance (Heylin 85). Supposedly, Dylan was inspired to record the song after reading Soledad Brother, but the song’s release was shrouded in skepticism (Scaduto 393). For example, when Anthony Scaduto scurried to revise an article on Dylan’s politics after hearing “George Jackson,” eight of the eleven “writers, radicals, musicians, [and] Dylan watchers” he asked to comment “felt strongly that Dylan was not being honest in the song” (337). The suspicion with which “George Jackson” was received may be justified, but it also attests to the effectiveness of Dylan’s escape. In any event, if “George Jackson” was received by many as a concession to Dylan’s political fans, a return to the old Dylan who sang “protest songs,” the song is not the product of nostalgia for Dylan’s early 1960s Civil Rights songs. Rather, “George Jackson” is clearly in line with late 1960s politics of Black Power. Norman Harris describes the shift from the integrationist politics of the early 1960s movement for Civil Rights to the politics of Black Power; In 1966 James Meredith was shot before completing his “March Against Fear” from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. His shooting outraged many Americans and a decision was made by the civil rights community and the emerging nationalist community that the march would be completed. During the course of the march, Willie Ricks, an Atlanta activist and SNCC [Student Non­ violent Coordinating Committee] member, chanted the slogan Black Power. At a speech made during the march, Stokely Carmichael, the president of SNCC, said African-Americans had to stop asking for things, and start securing Black Power. The slogan galvanized a generation, touching a complex of feelings and ideas that could not be touched by the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement. In general, Black Power came to mean the empowerment of African- American communities in accordance to the goals and wishes of those 252 communities. A tremendous amount of attention was given to “Nation Building,” which came to mean the creation and support of independent African-American institutions. (10) Harris provides an origin for Black Power, but, more importantly, he describes many of the movement’s widely acknowledged tenets: the push to “stop asking for things” and form “independent African-American institutions” led by African Americans and free of the white left; the interest in nationalism; and an alternative to “the rfietoric of the Civil Rights Movement,” a rhetoric that Black Power advocates saw as too assimilationist and too indebted to the patronage of the white left. “Black Power” is an unwieldy term covering numerous organizations and people, including the SNCC under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael in 1966 and H. Rap Brown in 1967; the Black Panthers, formed by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in 1966; the Nation of Islam and, in particular, Malcolm X; the “cultural nationalism” of the Black Arts Movement; etcetera. Likewise, Black Power represented and still represents a controversy for many activists, critiqued by groups like the NAACP and the Urban League in its time and still controversial for its masculinist leadership (11,13). If complicated and controversial. Black Power marked a shift away from early 1960s leftist political movements, and many of the critiques Black Power advocates made of the early 1960s left mirror Dylan’s ECLC speech, so it should come as little surprise that Dylan would lionize a Black Panther hero even if his level of commitment to Black Power was minimal. In fact, Dylan’s relationship with the Black Panther Party was antagonistic, if not the product of gossip, before it actually got started: Among a certain element of the radical movement that is distressed by Dylan’s “sellout,” a story is making the rounds concerning a meeting between Dylan and Black Panthers Huey Newton and David Hilliard. Some time in the fall of 1970 attorney Gerald Lefcourt wrote a letter to Dylan at Hilliard’s request, asking Bob to do a benefit or in some way help raise funds for the Panther trids. Many months later Dylan met with Newton and Hilliard. Dylan was still enthused about Israel and as soon as they sat down Dylan began to lecture them on the Panther’s anti- Zionist pronouncements. Within moments Hilliard leaped up, angry, and headed for the door shouting: “Let’s get out of here! We can’t talk to this Zonist pig!” Newton said to “cool it” and Hilliard returned to the discussion. It lasted for another hour or more, but was a standoff. “I can’t help you as long as the Panthers are against Israel,” Dylan is said to have told them. (Scaduto 321-322)

253 None of the parties involved confirmed this story, but it nicely illustrates both the continuing need for many to believe that Dylan was still politically active and the stories that have circulated about Dylan’s late 1960s and early 1970s flirtation with radical Zionist and Black Power politics, dangerous bedfellows as the legend would have it. Dylan’s commitment to action is cause for speculation, but “George Jackson” indicates a Dylan enthused about a new outlaw hero; He wouldn’t take shit from no one He wouldn’t bow down or kneel. Authorities, they hated him Because he was just too real. Lord, Lord, They cut George Jackson down. Lord, Lord, They laid him in the ground. George Jackson’s refusal to “take shit” is clearly in line with the spirit of Black Power. Oddly, it is also not entirely inconsistent with Dylan’s country mm. For instance, in 1968, Dylan’s country hero and friend Johnny Cash climbed Billboard’s Country Charts with “Folsom Prison Blues.” The Cash song, like Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” (1968), has a prisoner wishing he had listened to his mother. But “Folsom Prison Blues” also has its prisoner loathing the rich, and the live version performed at Folsom acmally draws cheers of elation when Cash sings, ‘T shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Also, Dylan’s interest in Jackson draws from the outlaw tradition of Old Left heroes like Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” and the Wobbly singer and martyr Joe Hill. But “George Jackson” is a different sort of outlaw song for Dylan, an idea with which Dylan was certainly familiar from the Anglo and African American badman traditions, but an outlaw minus the westem imagery of the others I have noted. Jerome Rodnitzky’s “Also Bom in the USA: Bob Dylan’s Outlaw Heroes and the Real Bob Dylan” (1988), the only critical piece I have seen solely devoted to Dylan’s celebration of outlaws, lists Dylan’s outlaw heroes as Woody Guthrie, George Jackson, boxer and prisoner Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, gangster Joey Gallo, and comedian Lenny Bruce. Interestingly, all of these outlaws are twentieth-cenmry historical figures, only Guthrie is represented in a Dylan song before 1970, and only Guthrie has any overt association with westem imagery. We have seen fictional and historical outlaws of 254 westem legend associated with Dylan’s 1960s work, and Dylan went on to make music about Billy the Kid and a number of fictional outlaws and gunfighters in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but Rodnitsky’s choices indicate a shift to include more urban outlaw heroes, a shift that starts with “George Jackson.” Interestingly, Rodnitsky’s choices also indicate a shift to more celebratory images of the outlaw. Joey Gallo may be an ambiguous choice, but the song “Joey” (1975) treats him heroically all the same. Moreover, the songs “George Jackson,” “Hurricane” (1975), and “Lenny Bruce” (1981) are far more celebratory than “Rambling, Gambling Willie,” “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” and “Outlaw Blues.” Perfiaps the songs for Jackson, Carter, and Bruce contain their own ironies, but only Joey Gallo approaches the irony with which Dylan celebrates John Wesley Hardin(g). Part of the change in tone that maries Dylan songs like “George Jackson” has to do with a shift in Dylan’s project. “Rambling, Gambling Willie” combines the Robin Hood outlaw of the Guthrie tradition with the professionalism of Hickok to suggest a moral disparity between commerce and commitment in the early 1960s folk revival. “Bob Dylan’s Blues” undermines the outlaw’s leadership potential by jokingly suggesting that he can lead listeners to bank robbery. “Outlaw Blues” uses the outlaw to explore Dylan’s betrayal of the folk revival and/or its betrayal of him. “John Wesley Harding” makes ironic the suggestion of the “good” outlaw’s heroic friendship with “the poor,” while refiguring heroism as evasion. And “Wanted Man” reflexively celebrates the rambling of the outlaw and the musician, but not without suggesting that this life is a dangerous trap. “George Jackson” is slightly different, mainly because it is in Jackson that Dylan sees that “tmth” he tells at the ECLC’s Tom Paine award ceremony and the “tmth” he threatens to tell in “Califomia” and its revision “Outlaw Blues”; Jackson is hated by “the authorities” because he is “just too real.” Of course, Dylan’s inclination to romanticize Jackson as the “real” thing is common in the folk revival and political community he disavowed in the early 1960s. Dylan’s interest in the “truth” and the “real” that lurk behind the organization, like Pete Seeger’s 1930s search for the “inborn” politics in “the folk,” illustrates an authenticity politics that has informed both folklore studies and the politics of the left all along. If Dylan’s ECLC speech loathes the assimilationism of polite African Americans being patronized by white

255 liberals, his counter-image of the black ghetto full of junkies and the “real” disenfranchised is equally romantic. But Dylan’s depiction of Jackson as “too real,” if a stereotype, also concurs with Jackson’s Black Power heroism, where he is a martyr for the cause of prison reform but also a Black Man refusing to “bow down and kneel.” Likewise, Dylan’s depiction of Jackson jibes well with Norman Mailer’s now-famous meditation on the Beats “The White Negro” (1957) and countless other 1950s and 1960s works that exemplify the construction of white masculinity through black masculinity. However, I am most interested in “George Jackson” for its lack of westem imagery and whether or not this brief turn away from the westem outlaw illustrates a potential incompatibility between the image of the westem outlaw and the political interests of 1960s and 1970s African Americans. Bob Dylan knows the African American “badmen”: Staggolee, Cassie Jones, Railroad Bill, John Hardy. Moreover, if the exploits of some of these characters have been urban, Dylan knows that these characters have crossed over into rural Anglo-American tradition. Lastly, the 1960s Dylan knew enough to associate African American heroes with the West. Yet, Dylan’s westem outlaws consistently draw on white sources. Admittedly, “George Jackson” is a “topical song,” practically tom from the pages of the newspaper, so it would be next to absurd for Dylan to put the prison martyr in spurs, but Dylan’s avoidance of African American westem outlaw heroes, combined with his celebration of figures like George Jackson, says something about the use value Dylan finds in westem images. That Dylan’s most explicit 1960s reference to a westem outlaw is the homicidal racist Wes Hardin might indicate that Dylan imagines an incompatibility between the westem genre and African American culture, but for this to be true, Dylan would have to be imagining this in the face of an increasing number of westems by and/or about African Americans. If 1960s attempts to add people of color to the westem now seem deeply flawed, suffice it to say that the possibility existed, from actor Woody Strode’s westem films to Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969) to Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut Buck and the Preacher (1971). However, if Dylan’s African American outlaws are not westem and his westem outlaws are not African Americans, he fuses the two hero types in “Hurricane” (1975), his song protesting the false imprisonment of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Dylan’s

256 chorus repeatedly imagines Carter’s potential heroism: “Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been / The champion of the world” (375-377). And this heroism has a political dimension beyond Carter’s athleticism, especially given the associations of boxing with black politics from Jack Johnson to Muhammad Ali. In fact, at one benefit for Carter, Ali bragged, “I know you all came here to see me, because Bob Dylan just ain’t that big.. (qtd. in Shelton 460-461). Dylan and co-writer Jacques Levy found in Carter a good man falsely imprisoned but also a badman hero like George Jackson, a “one time” Pan-African “champion of the world” and a new model for outlaw heroism and sociopolitical engagement It is a tribute to Dylan’s history with the westem hero and with the politics of evasion, however, that Dylan identifies with Carter through imagery of the West and of escape: Rubin could take a man out with just one punch But he never did like to talk about it all that much. It’s my work, he’d say, and I do it for pay And when it’s over I’d just as soon go on my way Up to some paradise )\%ere the trout streams flow and the air is nice And ride a horse along a trail. But then they took him to the jaUhouse Where they tried to turn a man into a mouse. (376) “Hurricane” is a fitting tribute to Dylan’s use of westem imagery and images of heroism all along. Rubin Carter is a real person, and Dylan’s attempts to free Carter were a real sociopolitical effort. But Dylan’s “Hurricane” fittingly imagines its protagonist, even amidst Dylan’s new emphasis on the black badman hero, as a professional performer desperate to escape to some westem frontier. Bob Dylan’s westem heroes do not defy politics for the artist so much as they help Dylan refuse commitment to any specific political group. At each stage of Dylan’s development, the westem hero figures as a reference to the limitations of heroism in general or a symbol of evasion for an artist afraid of being exploited. Dylan’s transformations often participate in a redefinition of politics; in fact, only Dylan’s late 1960s agrarian and country phases fail to support leftist politics in some explicit way. Nevertheless, Dylan’s images of the westem hero are either themselves reluctant to serve (e.g., “Outlaw Blues,” “John Wesley Harding,” “Drifter’s Escape,” “Wanted Man,”

257 “Hurricane”), or these images help the artist refuse to be pinned down through a critique of westem heroism (e.g., “Rambling, Gambling, Willie,” “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” “John Wesley Harding”). Dylan’s westem heroes are among the most self-reflexive in history. Moreover, unlike Peckinpah’s self-loathing reflexivity, Dylan’s hints at the possibility of political engagement, but on the artist’s own terms. Nevertheless, Dylan’s westem heroes, through the evasive uses with which they are mobilized, are hard to imagine as part of a completely positive politics. Therefore, Dylan’s heroes, like Leonard’s and Peckinpah’s, exist more as examples of a genre’s and an artist’s sociopolitical limitations than as a clear direction for sociopolitical change. It is fitting that Dylan rinds that clear direction, albeit temporarily, in a real, African American man of the 1970s, and locates his empathy with Carter by imagining a shared westem escapism, because Dylan’s West functions better as a self-reflexive evasion than as a commitment to sociopolitical change. Throughout this dissertation, I have argued that the approach to the westem as sociopolitical allegory can be complicated and enriched by an attention to reluctant and evasive westem heroes in the 1960s and to the artists who consistently returned to these heroes. The reluctant, evasive, or otherwise flawed heroes of the era reveal a growing cynicism on the part of geiue artists regarding the sociopolitical effectiveness of formula heroes when it comes to addressing 1960s revolutions of race, class, region, and gender. Moreover, these heroes’ evasions of responsibility and/or failures speak to their producers’ pessimism about the possibility of sociopolitical revolution, though to varying degrees and in different ways. An author-based approach to the relationship between genre texts and sociopolitical contexts reveals pattems in artists’ uses of the westem hero and provides biographical context for the ways in which anxieties about politics end up in westems. This is especially clear in an era when convention and artistic control become intra-textual elements in an increasingly self-reflexive canon of artistic works. Nevertheless, an author-based approach is not the only approach to the sociopolitics of the westem. Moreover, an author-based to approach is not without its own challenges, since texts are often not produced by single artists but rather in collaboration. Of course, even in collaborative environments an emphasis on the author as a recognized persona in the self-conscious stracture of the text can reveal thematic connections between

258 authorial anxieties and reluctant diegetic heroes. For example, William Holden’s Peckinpah imitation in The Wild Bunch does much to connect the anxieties of the hero with those of the author. In other cases, however, contentious authorship can strain a text in more than one sociopolitical direction. In the final chapter of this dissertation, I raise questions about the limitations of an author-based approach to the sociopolitics of the westem by exploring Dylan’s 1970s use of the westem hero beside Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid (1973), a film in which Dylan both sang and starred.

259 CHAPTER?

“ROMANCE IN DURANGO”: COLLABORATION AND THE COUNTERCULTURE WESTERN

“This is called ‘Romance in Durango.’ We do this one a lot. I dedicate this to Sam Peckinpah. If he’s out there tonight, Sam, good luck.” —Bob Dylan, Boston Music Hall, November 20, 1975

This dissertation’s reading of the westem has been guided by white, male authors’ responses to issues of sociopolitical responsibility. I have suggested that genre heroes’ ambivalences about commitment reflect artists’ ambivalences about sociopolitical change at large in an era of radical social and political transformations. I have tried to show that white, male artists of the era consistently foreground the inadequacies and sociopolitical evasiveness of their heroes as a means of simultaneously addressing and resisting change. Nei±er solely politically progressive nor solely figures of backlash, these genre heroes and artists cling to the threshold of sociopolitical change. For example, artists of the period seem keenly aware of the racism and sexism at the heart of the westem, infinitely willing to self-consciously explore this racism and sexism, but at a loss for how to move on to less Eurocentric and phallocentric generic models of heroism. Certainly, the fact that the authors I have looked at are white and male informs the inclination of many westems to address the limitations of the westem hero without offering clear sociopolitical alternatives. Like their formula heroes and like other white men of their time, these authors must have felt limited and reluctant about their own potential for revolutionary heroism, even when sympathetic with some leftist revolutionary movements of their time. Exploring the sociopolitics of the westem through its authors addresses limitations in the approach to the westem as sociopolitical allegory, a common approach wherein the coincidence of historical events and the release of westem texts provides

260 frequently plausible but also convenient and reductive readings of the westem as a sociopolitical reflector. Thematic pattems of artistic production among specific artists reveal their habitual interests and often speak to the artists’ general anxieties about social and political change. These artists’ anxieties in tum reflect larger anxieties faced by white men of their era. By way of conclusion, the following chuter first demonstrates that the anxieties surrounding the production of getue texts in the late 1950s and 1960s carried over into the 1970s when artists like Bob Dylan fine-tuned their anxieties in increasingly gendered terms. Therefore, Dylan’s 1970s westem songs are the subject of this chapter’s first section. Dylan’s divorce from wife Sara in the mid-1970s informs the singer’s emphasis on the incompatibility between westem masculine agency and female needs. But through their emphasis on male/female relations Dylan’s westem songs move past the biographical and speak to larger anxieties about the limitations of patriarchy in an era of women’s liberation. Second, this conclusion seeks to address the complications involved in an author- based approach, so the other half of this chapter explores an early 1970s collaboration between Dylan and Peckinpah. Collaboration is a material reality of all media and is most clearly exemplified in the film industry. Revisionists of film theory and history have sometimes overcompensated for the hero-worship of auteur theory dominant in the 1960s by throwing the directorial baby out with the cult-worship bath water. Nonetheless, as the discussion of Peckinpah’s films should make clear, even the most totalitarian of directors are immersed in collaborative relationships, often contentious, with writers, performers, producers, and studios. This is certainly true of Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid (1973), wherein Peckinpah was at visionary odds not only with MGM President James Aubrey but also with the overwhelming iconic significance of cast member Bob Dylan. Therefore, after discussing Dylan’s gendered genre response to the 1970s, I explore Peckinpah and company’s use or misuse of Dylan in Pat Garrett. The tensions between Peckinpah’s persona and Dylan’s persona are played out in the film in a struggle between

261 old and young over heroic and narrative control that reflects Peckinpah’s love/hate relationship with the outlawry of the young counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“THIS TIME WE SHALL ESCAPE”: HEROIC (IM)POTENCY AND THE DYLAN WESTERN

In 1975 Bob Dylan experienced an artistic and commercial renaissance with the album Blood on the Tracks iust as he and wife Sara were drifting apart. With hindsight. Blood on the Tracks stands alongside Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights (1982) and Willie Nelson’s Phases and Stages (1974) and The Red Headed Stranger (1975) as one of the great albums of separation and divorce. It is probably no coincidence that the divorce album, a subvariety of the singer-songwriters’ confessional album, would grow in popularity in the 1970s. All of these albums grow out of a time of intense male and female réévaluation of relationships and agency, and all no doubt hinge on the fact that the 1970s brought with it a wave of feminism unrivaled since the long quest for suffrage half a century earlier. Moreover, like the sociopolitical cocktail of suffrage, the Great War, and urban industrialization in the first part of the twentieth-century, the 1970s were hard for many men to swallow, giving rise to new Hemingways and Howard Hawks in the form of James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex (1971), and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971). The era is one of masculinity in crisis. Correspondingly, the era is one of anti-feminist backlash. The masculinity crisis of the 1970s is hardly unprecedented. It draws inspiration firom established genres of male (im)potency at least as remote as Wister, Remington, and Teddy Roosevelt and as recent as the 1960s texts I have described in this dissertation. It is unsurprising, then, that the westem would be central to the masculinity crisis in Nelson’s album The Red Headed Stranger or the crisis of white masculinity in Forrest Carter’s novel of Southern outlawry Gone to Texas (1973) and Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation thereof. The Outlaw Josev Wales (1976). It is also unsurprising that Dylan would explore his own 262 romantic crisis through the westem, as exemplified on Blood on the Tracks’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” and on the subsequent album Desire (1976) with the song “Romance in Durango.” Lastly, it is fitting that both songs, like Dylan’s earlier westem songs, explore male heroic failures as responses to Dylan’s status as voice of a generation. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” (1975) tells the story of a love triangle between Lily, Rosemary, and Big Jim, soon to be intmded upon by a rake known only as the Jack of Hearts. In the midst of Lily and Rosemary’s abandonment of the town patriarch for the romantic stranger, a bank safe is robbed by the Jack of Hearts’s gang of thieves, indicating that the Jack of Hearts has fanned the flames of romantic conflict in order to divert attention from the robbery. But the Jack of Hearts is not the only confidence man in the story. All of the characters in the ballad are playing some role in life, and the cabaret provides the backdrop for this performative existence. The performative aspect of the proceedings in tum accentuates the song’s generic self- consciousness. The setting for the song is westem, as suggested by the names of the characters, the emphasis on gambling, the conventional drunken judge, and the eventual punishment by hanging.^'* However, other genres and styles inform the action of the song as well. For example, the story of backstage and performance in the song approximates conventions of the film and stage musical, and Rosemary plays the femme fatale of noir “tired of playing the role of Big Jim’s wife.” With a knife in her hand, she is “gazing at the future, riding on the Jack of Hearts,” both sexually and complicitously. Perhaps the most common feature of noir is the woman who uses the male dupe to free herself from another man, though the male dupe is often far more of an accomplice in the crime than his naive

The hanging judge resembles a combination of the lynch-loving Roy Bean and other drunken patriarchs— e.g., preachers, mayors, sheriffs—who frequently tum up as ineffectual symbols of masculine authority in the westem. Big Jim’s name recalls everyone from John Wayne’s Big Jake (1971) to the namesake of the westem ballad “Diamond Joe,” which Dylan later performed for the album Good As I Been To You (1992). 263 behavior lets on. Whatever the power and influence of the diabolical dame, in Dylan’s song the last laugh is enjoyed by the Jack of Hearts, who uses Rosemary’s desire to be free from Big Jim to create the story’s big distraction. The ballad begins in the off-season as the Jack of Hearts enters, already trying to stir up attention: The festival was over, the boys were all plannin’ for a fall. The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin’ in the wall. The curfew had b ^ n lifted and the gamblin’ wheel shut down. Anyone with any sense had already left town. He was standin’ in the doorway lookin’ like the Jack of Hearts. He moved across the mirrored room, “Set it up for everyone,” he said. Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin’ before he turned their heads. Then he walked up to a stranger and he asked him with a ^ n , “Could you kindly tell me, friend, what time the show begins?” Then he moved into the comer, face down like the Jack of Hearts. (364) The end of the festival and near desolation of the cabaret marks the end of the official season for performance, but real-life performance abounds. The stranger, for example, only looks like the Jack of Hearts, and the simile “face down like the Jack of Hearts” further implies that the character’s figurative existence will be our chief access to his identity. His immediate inclination to set up the bar draws only fleeting attention, but the apparent modesty of his moving into the comer “face down” is tempered by the performative aspect of his modesty, since “face down” also implies that he hides his real face and intentions. And the Jack of Hearts is hardly the only performer. The “mirrored room” reflects the ambiguity of his identity, fragmenting him into multiple possible characters, but the others, like a room full of mirrors, also reflect his duplicity with their own. Unnamed “boys,” for example, plan “for a fall,” perhaps preparing for the autumn of the cabaret, the next round of shows in the fall, or a comic routine with a pratfall. But more likely these boys are cheating at cards, are outside participants in the eventual robbery, or are even money holders orchestrating the robbery from the inside, i.e., preparing to “take a fall.” The Jack of Hearts sets up the bar but also sets up the crime for his boys and eventually sets up Rosemary as a scapegoat. He too is a scapegoat, setting up himself as the enemy “for everyone” else. And everyone’s retum to “what they were doin’ before he tumed their heads” suggests more than indifference, for, before the Jack of 264 Hearts even enters, the scene is marked by illusory inebriation if not outright duplicity. In fact, just as the Jack of Hearts’s asking “what time the show begins?” masks the show he is about to put on it also hints at the levels of deception already present in the house of shows. The possibility that deception and duplicity exist before the rake’s entrance is suggested in the third verse, where the appearance of the Jack of Hearts is foretold by the girls’ poker game: Backstage the girls were playing five-card stud by the stairs, Lily had two queens, she was hopin’ for a third to match her pair. Outside the streets were fillin’ up, the window was open wide, A gentle breeze was Wowin’, you could feel it from inside. Lily called another bet and drew up the Jack of Hearts. The Jack of Hearts arrives like the seasonal wind. Later, the backstage manager suspects foul play—i.e., infidelity, murder, robbery, or all three-by noting, “There’s something funny going on . . . I can just feel it in the air.” Fittingly, the Jack of Hearts enters with the “gentle breeze.” Lily is soon implied to be Big Jim’s mistress, as opposed to Rosemary in “the role of Big Jim’s wife,” and Lily’s wanting to draw a third queen may hint at her desire that Big Jim would move on to another mistress. What Lily gets instead is the Jack of Hearts, perhaps just as good for her in the grand scheme of events. In fact, the open window that brings the breeze and the stranger also represents Lily’s way out. The song never says explicitly what Lily is hiding, but both her deception and her relationship to Big Jim are implied. Lily is full of secrets, like Rosemary, who combs her hair and comes to town fluttering her “false eyelashes” for Big Jim verses later. Nevertheless, Dylan’s lyrical space is not just another male satire of female duplicity. Big Jim, like the women and the Jack of Hearts, also plays a part. Jim is the owner of “the town’s only diamond mine”: here “mine” either refers to a real mine or is a metaphor for a lucrative business like the cabaret itself; and, maybe coincidentally, the word “mine” is also a pun on the notion of possession. Moreover, Big Jim is, like everyone else, an actor in “real-life”: with “bodyguards and silver cane and every hair in place, / He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste.” Big Jim, like the Jack

265 of Hearts and perhaps the women, is basically an opportunist looking for an edge. He is also a typically destructive symbol of western patriarchal governance, laying all “to waste” in his quest for power and privilege. Before Lily, “the butterfly who just drew the Jack of Hearts,” starts her official performance, Jim frets that he has seen the Jack of Hearts somewhere before, “Maybe down in Mexico or a picture upon somebody’s shelf.” These lines are rich with potential details. Jim shares a past with the intruder, or perhaps one of his women does, immortalized as a “picture” upon her shelf, and the mirrored room makes the Jack of Hearts both a threat to Jim and his potential doppelganger. In either case, the Jack of Hearts threatens to steal Big Jim’s crown, i.e., his power, his ladies, or both. I refer here to Big Jim’s “crown” only figuratively, but the figurative issue of coronation is significant in the song. Rosemary, who plays the role of Big Jim’s wife, enters the cabaret’s “side door lookin’ like a queen without a crown,” while “Lily was a princess, she was fair-skinned and precious as a child.”^^ Lily has gone from princess to queen by stealing Rosemary’s crown: “It was known all around that Lily had Jim’s ring / And nothing could ever come between Lily and the king.” Moreover, the emphasis on y . dry takes on added significance in light of the robbery that all this amorous turmoil finally masks. But, the Jack of Hearts’s questionable motives aside, it seems that his intrusion offers both Lily and Rosemary a way out; Lily was a princess, she was fair-skinned and precious as a child. She did whatever she had to do, she had that certain flash everytime she smiled. She’d come away from a broken home and lots of strange affairs With men in every walk of life which took her everywhere. But she’d never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts. And: Rosemary started drinking hard and seeing her reflection in the knife. She was tired of the attention, tired of playin’ the role of Big Jim’s wife. She had done a lot of bad things, even once tried suicide. Was lookin’ to do just one good deed before she died. She was gazin’ to the future, riding on the Jack or Hearts. (365) Lily’s opportunism grows out of either a spoiled childhood followed by a “broken home” or a spoiled childhood resulting from a “broken home,” wherein the child becomes a

Note that Rosemary, not the apparent dance-hall girl Lily, is the one who must use the “side door." 266 “precious” commodity in the struggle between parents. But Lily’s opportunism is also what “she had to do,” which implies that she otherwise might not have had the power to go anywhere. Rosemary, like Lily, is driven by past regrets and disappointments, and both women see escape in the Jack of Hearts. Both Lily and Rosemary stand to gain by ridding themselves of Big Jim, but Rosemary is the one with the knife ready to do Big Jim in. Everything climaxes, finally, when Rosemary and Big Jim stumble upon Lily and the Jack of Hearts as the robbery takes place just two rooms away: No one knew the circumstance but they say that it happened pretty quick. The door to the dressing room burst open and a cold revolver clicked. And Big Jim was standm’ there, ya couldn’t say surprised, Rosemary right beside him, steady in her eyes. She was with Big Jim but she was leanin’ to the Jack of Hearts. Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall And cleared out the bank safe, it’s said they got off with quite a haul. In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground For one more member who had business back in town. But they couldn’t go no further without the Jack of Hearts. The next day was hangin’ day, the sky was overcast and black. Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back. And R o se m ^ on the gallows, she didn’t even blink. The hangin’ judge was sober, he hadn’t had a drink. The only person on the scene missin’ was the Jack of Hearts. The “circumstance” of the collision of the four lovers—and the real “circumstance” of robbery that “No one knew”—is vague, but the most likely scenario for these three verses is as follows: (1) Big Jim and Rosemary catch the Jack of Hearts and Lily in the throes of passion;

(2) Big Jim, who either recalls that Lily and the Jack of Hearts were once lovers or otherwise already suspects infidelity, is not shocked but still pulls a gun on the rake;

(3) Rosemary, out of love for the rake or contempt for her “husband,” stabs Big Jim;

(4) during the chaos, the boys hear the planned-for “fall” of Jim’s body as they liquidke the safe; (5) Rosemary hangs for the murder of Big Jim.

267 This plot summary is easy enough, but the subtleties still mount. For example, is Rosemary “steady” in her own eyes insofar as she is stunned by the image of Lily and the Jack of Hearts, or is she reflected in Lily’s “steady” eyes? The first possibility prefaces Rosemary’s lucid but catatonic stare on the gallows, while the latter situates the story in Lily’s point of view. The latter possibility is intriguing because it suggests that the Jack of Hearts is, most of all, Lily’s savior. Lily draws the Jack of Hearts at the beginning. And the song’s last verse concentrates on Lily’s freedom: The cabaret was empty now, a sign said, “Closed for repair,” Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair. She was thinkin’ ‘bout her father, who she very rarely saw, Thinkin’ ‘bout Rosemary and thiiikin’ about the law. But most of all she was thinkin’ ‘bout the Jack of Hearts. (366) Lily, who drew the “sign” of the Jack of Hearts that opened Pandora’s box, is freed from the cabaret. The cabaret is literally closed because of the robbers’ “drilling in the wall” but figuratively closed in that the official performer Lily, exploited dance-hall girl of the musical and the western, is freed from the masquerade, taking “all of the dye out of her hair.” But Lily’s freedom is coupled with new patriarchal implications, i.e., her father, and with guilt over Rosemary, who found freedom only in death. Lastly, at the center of Lily’s thoughts and the song’s final ambiguity is the Jack of Hearts. While the Jack of Hearts’s gang awaits his return by the river, the song never narrates this return, so it is possible that Lily’s thoughts about the Jack of Hearts take precedence because he remains her discrete lover, necessarily absent from the hanging but waiting for her in secret. Also possible, however, is that he is absent from the hanging because he has fled with his gang, leaving Lily to long for him.^^ Either way, the image in “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is firmly steeped in the romance of the mysterious drifter, whose transience makes the heart grow fonder. But, on a more disturbing level, this romance destroys lives, Rosemary’s especially, and is tainted by the master plan: theft.

A third possibility, never really hinted at but never really disclaimed either, is that the Jack of Hearts has been killed during the amorous conflict in the backstage room. 268 Blood of the Tracks, in keeping with the complex emotions of separation and divorce, is an album of unusual temporal shifts, where memory intrudes so frequently that it is often impossible to locate a single narrative present This is true in the song “Shelter From the Storm,” where every verse repeats the chorus of female salvation, “‘Come in,’ she said, / ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm’” (361-362). In the fifth verse of this song about memories of a drifter’s moment of sanctuary, the line “Suddenly I turned around and she was standin’ there” is actually used to preface a meeting that has already happened five times in the chorus. Memory on the album is intrusive, and time is subject to memory’s constant manipulation. “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’’ is the only explicitly western song on the album and ostensibly the album’s most linear narrative ballad. Its propulsive, almost canned, studio drumming and circular guitar chording stand out on an album of odd chord progressions, unusual meters and tempos, and lyrical fits of temporal and spatial dislocation, exemplified on songs like ‘Tdiot Wind” and “Tangled Up in Blue.” The song finds a sort of generic insulation from the album’s otherwise traumatic collision of memories, but the very anachronism of the western setting brings the past into explicit focus even as it insulates the singer in a genre that, at its closest, only resembles contemporary real-life allegorically. Moreover, memory still plagues the characters in the song—e.g., memory in the form of Big Jim’s struggle to recall the Jack of Hearts’s mysterious face or Lily and Rosemary’s sorted pasts—and it is tempting to pick over the biographical details of Bob’s relationship with wife Sara for incidents informing this western tale. The autobiographical Dylan is always too mixed with the Dylan persona to make the most specific of biographical contexts much more than artifacts in an analytical treasure hunt. Nevertheless, the general details of the Dylans’ decline nicely serve as a foundation for the relationships in Dylan’s western song: For eight years. Bob and Sara carried on peacefully. They raised their five kids and enjoyed a life of virtual anonymity on the bactooads of upstate New York. But the family idyll couldn’t last. Bob demanded more of the scene, and Sara just couldn’t sit around and talk rock ‘n roll all day long. It wasn’t her second language. Nor was the scene her natural habitat; she came off as aloof and uncomfortable around the manic shudder of perpetually tumed-on musicians. She wasn’t a role player like Yoko or Linda McCartney. She harbored no secret

269 ambition to peifonn. No, Sara was cursed with being a dedicated wife and mother whose neediest dependent happened to be a superstar husband in constant motion. And she’d finally run out of patience. (Spitz 449) It was in a shift to a more agrarian and domestic western imagery that Dylan had articulated his drifter’s escape from politics and the public eye in the late 1960s. It is fitting, then, that a return to the gambler-outlaw would mark his mid-1970s return to the Greenwich Village scene. From “Rambling, Gambling Willie” to “John Wesley Harding,” Dylan had found in the western hero a dual image of the politicized good outlaw and the master escapist, and with “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” the image again mediates an ambivalent hero between worlds. The Jack of Hearts frees Rosemary, “tired of the attention, tired of playin’ the role of Big Jim’s wife,” but she is destroyed by this freedom, a disturbing biographical note in light of Sara’s disillusionment with Dylan’s new entrance into an old but transformed New York scene. Lily, another possible Sara, is also freed, but she must share the Jack of Hearts with the “boys” who await his retum.^^ The transition from moneyed town patriarch and kept wife to outlaw and dance-hall girl nicely frames the song’s fantasies about starting over and a new road of open options. Moreover, this transition stands for a great deal more than Dylan’s personal life; it also returns Dylan’s western imagery to its social context, its original world of outlaws and outsiders. Other songs on Blood on the Tracks specifically reference the 1960s—e.g., “I lived with them on Montague Street/In a basement down the stairs, / There was music in the cafes at night / And revolution in the air” (358). “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is easily read as another instance of this retum to the 1960s past. It is in the context of this social retum, however, that the ambivalences introduced with the song’s more personal details take even more shape. Particularly, Lily, in her sociopolitical context, becomes heir to the 1960s heroines of The Beatles’s “She’s Leaving Home” (1967) and The Velvet Underground’s “Rock & Roll” (1970). These are young damsels at odds with the older generation embodied in their biological families and stifling

In Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara (1978), a conceptually bloated and overlong foray into the avant-garde that plays like an intriguing but unsuccessful response to Nashville fl975\ Dylan plays Renaldo, Sara plays Clara, others play Bob and Sara, and identities in general shift about erratically. The notion of Big Jim and the Jack of Hearts as Dylan avatars and Rosemary and Lily as Sara avatars is a plausible precedent for the later film. 270 towns, runaways freed from the conservative old world by rock ‘n’ roll. Lily, however, is the end result of this youth exodus. She is like the heroines of Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1970) and, later, Agnes Varda’s film Vagabond (1985); young women teased by rock ‘n’ roll into life on the road and then destroyed by its sexism and, in the case of Varda’s heroine, material conditions unaddressed by countercultural detachment. Dylan’s song is far less sophisticated an exploration of the gender inconsistencies of this romance of the road than either Oates’s or Varda’s dystopian visions, but if Lily has managed to escape a family in the past and a marriage to Big Jim, her options are presented as limited. This is not to say that Dylan’s is a conservative backlash against the Woodstock generation; rather, Lily’s romance of the road is complicated by her dependence on men, her guilt over Rosemary, and her moment of limbo in the song’s last line. She is cursed by memory to think not about herself but about the Jack of Hearts, her symbol of freedom that was always also an agent of greed creating the perfect distraction. The song’s ambivalence about the 1960s is embodied in Lily’s predicament, but the first verse of the song reflects on the 1960s as well: The festival was over, the boys were all plannin’ for a fall. The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin’ in the wall. The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin’ wheel shut down. Anyone with any sense had already left town. The “curfew” is lifted. The young have grown old. The party is over. Yet, the curfew has not been completely lifted for the showgirl. She stays out a little later but is no less constrained. The boys plan “the fall” just as the freedom of the road still taunts Lily and Rosemary, and I finally wonder how aware Dylan was of the gendered ironies and double standards of the song, where Rosemary suffers for the boys’ crimes and Lily’s freedom remains always partial. “Romance in Durango” answers the question of Dylan’s awareness; few of the artist’s songs so thoroughly explore male heroic failure. The song was eventually included on Desire (1976), an aptly named, if sometimes uneven, fusion of lost-love songs, mythology, and larger-than-life real people: Rubin Carter, gangster Joey Gallo, Walter Cronkite, James Cagney. On the aforementioned opening track “Hurricane,” aimed at

271 freeing Rubin Carter from prison, Dylan makes Carter a Pan-African “champion of the world” as much as he is a boxer falsely imprisoned. However, Dylan also identifres with Carter by imagining the song’s hero as just another esc^ist cowpoke: And when it’s over I’d just as soon go on my way Up to some paradise ^ ^ e re the trout streams flow and the air is nice And ride a horse along a trail [.] ( 376) But in “Romance in Durango” Dylan is clearly aware of the limitations of western heroism, as a singer-hero and dancer-heroine botch an escape after a murder. The song opens by self-reflexively foregrounding music itself while also establishing the singer-hero’s optimism: Hot chili peppers in the blistering sun Dust on my face and my cape. Me and Magdalena on the run I think this time we shall escape. Sold my guitar to the baker’s son For a few crumbs and a place to hide. But I can get another one And I’ll play for Magdalena as we ride. No Uores, mi querida Dios nos vigila Soon the horse will take us to Durango. Agarrame, mi vida Soon the desert will be gone Soon you will be dancing the fandango. (385) [Don’t cry, my beloved God watches (or “watches over”) us Soon the horse will take us to Durango. Hold on to me, my life (or “my darling”) Soon the desert will be gone Soon you will be dancing the fandango.] Dylan, who usually does not include Spanish in his songs, may have had some help from Jacques Levy, who is listed as the song’s co-writer. Whatever its source, the Spanish chorus puns in revealing ways. For example, the assurance that “God watches over us” is tempered by the soon-to-be revealed reason for their exodus: murder. God may just as easily watch in judgment as watch over to protect Moreover, the singer’s order for Magdalena to hold him can be read as his protection of his “darling” or her protection of his “life.” In fact, agency, both hers and his, is a key factor in the song from these first verses 272 on, and the issue of agency is inextricably tied to the song’s narration. The first and second verses narrate to an assumed listener and refer to Magdalena in the third person, but the chorus is clearly not only sung to Magdalena but largely imperative, directing her behavior. He is the singer, she the dancer. Moreover, the chorus seems to grow directly out of the last line of the second verse: “And I’ll sing for Magdalena as we ride.” This bit of self-reflexivity locates the singer’s chorus, which is about reassurance and male imperative agency, not in the song’s present but rather in the future; this is the chorus he will sing once he gets a new guitar. Therefore, the chorus, which orders Magdalena to take comfort in their escape, is wishful thinking from the very beginning of the song. The chorus, while proclaiming the heroic potency of the singer, is also ironic. Moreover, the heroics of the song are ironic beyond questions of who is protecting whom and the chorus’s status as wishful thinking, since the escape depends on a number of outside circumstances and outside agents, e.g., God and the horse. After the first chorus the singer reveals the crime: Past the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people Hoofbeats like castanets on stone. At night I dream of bells in the village steeple Then I see the bloody face of Ramon. The setting itself is beautifully rendered by the singer but full of “ruins” and “ghosts”; these are hardly tourist’s images, for the chase allows no time for contemplation. Whatever romance this setting provides, the musical simile of “Hoofbeats like castanets on stone” recalls that the singer has sold his means of making music. And his sense of agency begins to slip as well in the next verse: Was it me that shot him down in the cantina Was it my hand that held the gun? Come, let us fly, my Magdalena The dogs are barking and what’s done is done. The dogs, like the hoofbeats in the previous verse, tell his story for him, as the singer struggles to comprehend what he has done. The interrogative, along with the association of the crime with his “hand” instead of his whole self, betrays a hero whose promises of future action are combined with fear of responsibility for past actions. His orders to

273 Magdalena turn almost to requests: “Come, let us fly, my Magdalena.” Therefore, the ironies of the chorus at the beginning of the song are amplified by the revelations of murder and uncertainty when the refrain follows a choir of barking dogs. With the hero’s optimism slipping along with his sense of agency, it makes sense that the verse after the refrain is in future tense: At the corrida we’ll sit in the shade And watch the young torero stand alone. We’ll drink tequila where our grandfathers stayed When they rode with Villa into Toriedn. Optimism caves to desperate fantasies of esc^)e amid wishftd images of masculine heroes, from the “torero” (“bullfighter”) to the legendary outlaw Pancho Villa. The torero is more than a masculine heroic model standing alone. Rather, the image concedes agency to one outside the singer, and to a physical performer, like Magdalena the dancer, at that. The “corrido” (“song”) gives way to the “corrida” (“bullfight”), and the singer gives in to desperate images of heroism clearly outside himself. It is in the song’s final verses, however, that the issue of the singer’s agency, as teller and hero, is most interestingly undermined: Was that the thunder that I heard? My head is vibrating, I feel a sharp pain. Come sit by me, don’t say a word Oh, can it be that I am slain? Quick, Magdalena, take my gun Look up in the hills, that flash of light. Aim well my little one We may not make it through the night. The alienation from the natural and the historical, wherein the setting and the overwhelming history of the space are constantly subordinated to the chase, is complete when the singer wishes the gunfire was thunder. The singer, the maker of sound, has lost an aural battle to Castanet hoofbeats, barking dogs, and distant guns, even as he tostruggles silence his lover: “Come sit by me, don’t say a word.” He struggles to act heroically and artistically: to make good on his promises to Magdalena and to narrate the happy ending. But he must face a reality over which he has little control, a deterministic world where a “sharp pain” proceeds awareness of his impending death. Most interesting, however, is the song’s shift from the hero’s fantasies of escape to the heroine’s necessary action. Magdalena, with the 274 gun, is still given orders and even patronized as “my little one.” The song’s last revelation, however, is that the hero becomes damsel just as his optimism collapses; “We may not make it through the night.” “Romance in Durango” is a remarkable song about male heroic arrogance and self­ doubt. The singer-hero attempts to summon romantic heroic validation in the landscape, tradition, history, religion, and the promise of his own heroic potency. But this attempt collapses in the face of something more deterministic. The song’s reversal of the heroic action from hero to heroine is incomplete, since the song falls not so much into romantic fantasies about the heroine’s potential as into a self-conscious exploration of the singer’s refusal to believe in her. Agency shifts from hero to heroine, revealing Dylan’s acknowledgement of the limitations of the male hero and the possibility that this hero is really a dependent. However, the corresponding decline in the hero’s optimism speaks to the hero’s failure to imagine the tables fully turned, with his life comfortably in the hands of Magdalena. The song represents a crisis that is both personal and political. Biographer Bob Spitz’s claim that “Sara was cursed with being a dedicated wife and mother whose neediest dependent happened to be a superstar husband in constant motion” is applicable to “Romance in Durango,” for in his personal relationships with women Dylan’s heroic status as voice of a generation often deferred to his dependency (449). In political terms, however, the collapse of Dylan’s male hero speaks to a bankruptcy of masculinist ideology at the heart of the western. The hero desperately attempts to control the outcome of the ballad through orders and optimism, but these self-reflexive attempts culminate in his heroic and artistic failure. However, the objective in the song is ultimately male self­ critique, and the rise of Magdalena as heroine is less a revisionist image of new possibilities than a self-conscious exploration of masculinity at the threshold of radical change, unable to believe in masculinist fantasies of the past but unable to optimistically accept a future of female agency. In this respect. Bob Dylan shares a great deal with Sam Peckinpah, for both seem bent on revealing the limitations of male heroic models but fail to imagine gendered political progress in positive terms. Nevertheless, as the next section indicates, the one collaboration between Dylan and Peckinpah is marked by their

275 differences rather than their similarities. This collaboration, Pat Garrett and Billv the FCitL represents a misreading of Dylan’s image. More importantly, however, it represents a collision of generations in conflict

“FEELS LIKE TIMES HAVE CHANGED”: SAM PECKINPAH AND BOBBY THE KID

The businessmen from Taos want you to go down They’ve hired Pat Garrett to force a showdown. Billy, don’t it make ya feel so low-down To be shot down by the man who was your friend? -Bob Dylan, “BUly” (1973) Billy: “Old Pat Garrett. Sold out to the Santa Fe Ring. How does it feel?” Garrett: “Feels like times have changed.” Billy: “Times maybe, not me.” —Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Despite the remarkable similarities between Dylan’s and Peckinpah’s images of male heroic impotency, their one collaboration, Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid, is fraught with tensions between the aging youth counterculture, of which Dylan was still a reluctant representative, and the old heroes of the West, for whom Peckinpah had become an uncomfortable eulogist. It is easy to see why Peckinpah would be drawn to the script by young novelist Rudolph Wurlitzer—of the jukebox and organ fortune—for “Wurlitzer’s Billy,” like most of Peckinpah’s heroes, “was no noble Robin Hood” (Weddle 454). In the final product, however, Billy (Kris Kristofferson) remains underdeveloped, and it is clear that Garrett (James Cobum) has received the most attention in terms of script revision and direction. Part of this attention to Garrett is attributable to Cobum’s greater experience as an actor; Pat Garrett was only Kristofferson’s third film (Katz 767). Another reason for this attention is that Garrett is the film’s aging hero, and his transition from heroic outlaw to harbinger of the establishment is the film’s primary focus. In 1969 Peckinpah claimed, “Men who have lived out of their times, et cetera. I’ve played that out” (qtd. in Seydor Peckinpah: The Western Films 255). Nevertheless, Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett is another

276 film about men who have outlived their times. The tensions between Garrett’s and Billy’s characterizations make it clear that Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid is partly about generational conflicts. Furthermore, the imbalance between Garrett’s and Billy’s development as characters stems from conflicting projects of the producer and director that reflect generational differences of the time. Producer Gordon Carroll, on the one hand, saw the film as an opportunity to make a western with “some contemporary relevance, but without its being forced or strained” (qtd. in Seydor 261). Specifically, according to Seydor, Carroll was intrigued by “parallels between rock stars and outlaw heroes,” particularly their mutual burning of the candle at both ends, twice as bright but half as long. It was Carroll and Kristofferson, then, who first became interested in using Bob Dylan for the film’s music (Weddle 467).58 Peckinpah, on the other hand, at first saw the film’s contemporary relevance as less about the rock ‘n’ roll counterculture than about high-level government corruption of the older generation. Watergate and Nixon’s belittling of the My Lai massacre disturbed Peckinpah greatly. He told Anthony Macklin, “Nixon’s pardoning of Calley [i.e., for My Lai] was so distasteful to me that it makes me really want to puke” (qtd. in Weddle 459). The notion of unchecked political corruption surrounding Garrett’s alliance with the Sante Fe Ring was to Peckinpah infinitely relevant to the current corruption in Washington. The director told Jan Aghed: The inevitability of Billy and Garrett’s final conflict fascinates me. Also the inevitability of Billy’s death. The . .. irony is the so-called Santa Fe Ring, which was controlled by a group of people represented by Albert Fall and involved in a lot of land-grabbing and shady financial dealings, and Billy and the people around him resented that. Albert Fall later defended the murderers of Pat Garrett and got them off. You see, the same people who had hired Garrett to kill Billy years later had him assassinated, because as a police officer he was getting too close to their operation. . . Albert Fall later became United States Secretary of the Interior, which may be some comment on today’s government, (qtd. in Weddle 459) Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid was, therefore, originally conceived by the director as an exploration of the corruption of power brokers, and the emphasis on Garrett’s suicidal alliance with the economic and legal establishment was a means of exploring the contagious nature of this corruption.

58 Given the influence of Carroll and others, Ralph Brauer’s claim, “it was a stroke o f sheer genius [on Peckinpah’s part] to cast Dylan and Kristofferson,” may overstate the director’s control (qtd. in Engel 28). 277 The final “director’s cut” of the film partly reconciles Carroll’s and Peckinpah’s visions of the story insofar as it plays Garrett’s morally corrupting attempts to become “legitimate” against Billy’s desire to remain firee. In order to firame Garrett’s dilemma between old establishment and young freedom, the director’s cut celebrates the Kid and his cohorts as embodiments of the youth counterculture Garrett has lost. Carroll’s, Wurlitzer’s, and much of the cast’s interests in rock ‘n’ roll guided the film’s creation, but Peckinpah seems to have resisted this influence much less than he resisted more pressing intrusions by MGM President James Aubrey, which I will discuss shortly. Even before folk-country icon Kris Kristofferson was cast as the Kid, the choices for the part were actors with countercultural associations: Peter Fonda, Jon Voight, Malcolm McDowell, Don Johnson (Fine 244) .^9 Carroll, Wurlitzer, and, no doubt, Peckinpah were aware that theirs would be partly a youth market. Billy’s countercultural microcosm, however, is no facile romantic image of outlawry. Billy’s gang is itself aging and increasingly sedentary. They spend long days womanizing, sleeping in, drinking, and playing games. Therefore, the film’s interesting dual critique ultimately interrogates an older generation selling out at the same time as it problematizes the heroic status of the younger generation. The final director’s cut of Pat Garrett makes no clear allegorical references to Watergate, My Lai, or Nixon beyond suggesting that old money and political power are synonymous with corruption, a suggestion that admittedly might have been enough for many audiences in the early 1970s. What the director’s cut does instead is present Billy as a model for what Garrett could be as a leader of the people. As Garrett struggles for leadership, mainly by bullying and making lackeys of everyone he encounters, Billy effortlessly inspires admiration in the hearts of those around him. Garrett’s struggle for Billy’s level of leadership is, in turn, reflected

^9 Fonda was famous for cult films The Wild Angels (1966), The Trip (1967), and Easy Rider (1969). and he had directed the underrated coimterculture western The Hired Hand (1971) and starred in Dennis Hopper’s counterculture western The Last Movie (1971); Voight had starred in the modem western Midnight Cowbov (1969) and the war satire Catch 22 (1970); McDowell was infamous for Anderson’s IL . (1968) and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971); and Johnson had starred in the trendy rock ‘n’ roll western Zachariah (1970). 278 thematically in an opposition between Garrett’s lack of narrative control and the narrative prowess of both Billy and Alias (Bob Dylan), a self-reflexive feature of the film that later involves a didactic cameo by Peckinpah himself. The cameo id en ^es Peckinpah with Garrett but also serves as the director’s critique of Garrett and, by association, himself. Interestingly, the cameo occurs at a point after the chronicler Alias has been humiliated by Garrett. Peckinpah’s intrusion into the narrative is presented as an alliance with Garrett and with Garrett’s dilemma and opposed to Dylan’s/Alias’s alliance with the Kid, and this feature carries the generational conflicts from within the narrative explicitly to the level of the storytelling that constructs the legend. Both in terms of enmity and in terms of narrative control, the film presents a landscape governed by an analogy of generational conflict: Garrett is to Billy as Peckinpah is to Dylan. Therefore, I argue that the sociopolitical character of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid lies less in the director’s original criticism of Nixon than in a generational crisis wherein the director as persona is presented as aware of the corruption of the older generation but alienated from the younger. Before discussing these issues, however, a brief word on the versions of the film. Paul Seydor (1997) quotes Gordon Carroll that the production was a “battleground” that lasted “from two to three weeks before we started shooting until thirteen weeks after we finished” (257). Peckinpah’s drunkenness, stubbornness, and paranoia as well as his disputes with Carroll, Wurlitzer, and Dylan contributed partly to this battleground atmosphere, and these creative differences inform much of what is flawed in even the most complete director’s cut of the film (261, 299). All of these factors aside, however, the version of Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid that was released by MGM in 1973 and that was the official version on video until the late 1980s is genuinely mangled from the intrusion of MGM President James Aubrey. Despite an admirable salvage job by editors Roger Spottiswoode and Robert Wolfe, the 1973 release’s exclusions, especially of crosscutting at the film’s opening that suggests the suicidal nature of Garrett’s hunt for the Kid, diminish the character development of Garrett and the thematic significance of the film’s many episodic interludes. It is not necessary for the purposes of this argument to catalog all of the differences between the 1973 release, subsequent television releases, and

279 the now-available director’s cut. Nor is it necessary to rehash every detail of the sordid history of the film’s mangling. But a few words on each are appropriate if only to characterize some of the problems of interpretation that attend the film’s contentious production. First the mangling. Peckinpah’s disputes with Carroll, Wurlitzer, and Dylan were creative disputes, but there is very little to support any creativity on the part of James Aubrey. David Weddle’s presentation of Aubrey as the saboteur who cut 15 days from Blake Edwards’s The Carev Treatment (1972) in the middle of shooting may be a bit forced, but Weddle supports his biographical assault on Aubrey with a number of other details (463). For example, early in the production of Pat Garrett. Peckinpah and crew lost valuable footage, unnoticed until a number of scenes were already shot and developed, because of a bent mounting flange on a lens (467-468). The scenes were essential to the continuity of the film. Nonetheless, Aubrey, whether obsessed with getting the film out to finance the construction of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas or just fed up with Peckinpah, refused to allow for reshooting time (463,469). To make matters worse, the technical difficulties may have been avoided to begin with if the studio had not insisted that Peckinpah shoot in the harsh environment of Durango, Mexico without the camera mechanic the director requested (468). In response, Peckinpah and crew reshot most of the scenes in secret, but the time lost and the tension resulting from the reshooting accounts for part of Carroll’s association of the film with a battleground. Aubrey’s most egregious manipulation of the film, however, occurred during post-production. MGM honored Peckinpah’s contract with two screenings of the director’s cut, but the screenings were closed affairs at the studio. According to Peckinpah’s assistant Katy Haber, all of the influential names on Peckinpah’s invitation list—e.g., Heruy Fonda and Martin Baum— were refused admission (Weddle 482-483). In short, MGM’s upholding of the contract amounted to lip service, and the film was recut by the studio with no input from either an actual audience or anyone with the power to support Peckinpah’s cut. Peckinpah managed to sneak Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese, and Pauline Kael into a secret screening, and the director’s cut was eventually smuggled away from MGM, “shuffled over the years from film vaults to office refrigerators to [Peckinpah’s daughter] Kristen’s apartment’’ (483,

280 490). But it was not until Ted Turner agreed to restore the film in the late 1980s that the director’s cut again resurfaced officially, though even Turner’s cut lacks some of the original material (490-491). The key material missing from the Aubrey cut, essential to my argument and I think to the film’s thematic structure as well, is the opening sequence that crosscuts between New Las Graces, New Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century and Old Fort Sumner, New Mexico of 1881. The New Las Cruces future is either a flashforward or the narrative frame containing the film’s plot of Garrett’s 1881 pursuit and killing of the kid as a flashback. In the New Las Cruces frame Garrett complains that Poe (John Beck), the deputy with whom Garrett was forced to hunt the Kid by Governor Lew Wallace (Jason Robards) and business representatives Norris (John Chandler) and Howland (Jack Dodson), is running sheep on his land. Cut to Old Fort Sumner in 1881, where Billy and his gang shoot live chickens in a sadistic game of target practice. The director’s version crosscuts the gang’s target practice with Garrett’s murder in the future frame, creating the appearance that the Kid’s bullets are killing the future Garrett, revenge from beyond the grave. Suddenly, back in 1881, a younger Garrett rounds the comer unbeknownst to Billy’s gang and masterfully fires at the chickens with his rifle as the film cuts back to Garrett writhing in the future, suggesting that Garrett in the past has suicidally shot Garrett in the future. The suicidal nature of Garrett’s agreement to hunt the kid is established with a heavy stylistic hand in the director’s cut. However heavy-handed this material may be, the scene as crosscut reinforces a number of the film’s important features. First, the “New” of the New Las Cruces future balances against the “Old” of the Old Fort Sumner past to economically foreground the crisis of progress common in Peckinpah’s films. However, the future in Pat Garrett belongs to old money and power more completely and more pessimistically than in any other Peckinpah film. The typical associations of age are inverted so that the old world of outlaw freedom is represented by the younger Billy and the new world of greed-driven corruption is represented by the older Garrett, an inversion made particularly clear in the quotation from the epigraph to this section:

281 Billy: “Old Pat Garrett. Sold out to the Santa Fe Ring. How does it feel?” Garrett: “Feels like times have changed.” Billy: ‘Times maybe, not me.” These lines are spoken right after Ganett’s arrival in Old Fort Sumner to warn the Kid that he will hunt him in five days. In Charles Neider’s Authentic Death of Hendrv Jones (1956), a circuitous source for Peckinpah’s film, Garrett-figure Dad Longworth has a similar conversation with narrator Doc Baker. Dad confesses: “[...] Me I had enough of that life. Fellow has got to settle down. Take the Kid.” [Doc replies,] “Not the type.” “I want to have old age.” “What you want to be sheriff for then?” ‘Tt’s not that bad. Times are changing.” “Yeh I guess they are at that.” (44) Peckinpah and Wurlitzer may have borrowed the idea of changing times from Neider for a revision of the Pat Garrett script, but it is doubtful that many on the set missed the play on Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” inherent in Garrett’s “Feels like times have changed.” The irony is that here Dylan and Kristofferson, the figures of counterculture, are made to represent the longing for an older world of youthful rebellion, while Garrett is the one looking to a new world, but a new world where pragmatic alliances with corruption cut friendly ties.^ The future segment opening Pat Garrett is also important for its ambiguity as to whether it represents a flashforeward for the audience or the narrative frame from which the dying Garrett regrets the events of 1881. This ambiguity is significant because it allows for the possibility that the film is both a warning against the self-destructive quality of Garrett’s decision and an implicit foregrounding of Garrett’s point of view. There is no definite feature of the scene connecting the interior story with Garrett’s narrative point of view; e.g., there is no dissolve to define this interior story as a flashback. But this ambiguity only deepens the tensions at the heart of the film, for just as Garrett’s deal with

More subtle is the possible reference to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” in the Kid’s question, “How does it feel?” The Dylan song is an assault on luxury, and Garrett is a suitable target for such an attack. Also, the question, “How does it feel?” recalls a question Deke Thornton asks the railroad bully Harrigan in The Wild Bunch: “How does it feel to be so damn right?!” Harrigan sadistically replies, “Good.” 282 New Mexico’s elite leads to the death of the Kid and eventually himself, his struggle for control of his surroundings mirrors his narrative struggle to control the Kid’s legacy and, by association, his own. Throughout the film Garrett’s language is frankly heroic, and his boasts are attempts to salvage his self-image frrom the dirty work of assassination. For instance, after Billy escapes from Lincoln, Garrett visits Governor Lew Wallace, who dines with Howland and Norris, the film’s representatives of callous money interests. Garrett agrees to find Billy, but when the money men offer him $500 in advance he throws it in their faces with the dramatic line, “you better take your $500 and shove it up your ass and set fire to it.” Lew Wallace, walking Garrett from the table, whispers, “Commendable notion. Sheriff.” The scene establishes Garrett’s turmoil over the people he works for and, one might accurately assume, resembles many a Peckinpah meeting with studio brass. Peckinpah veterans Cobum and Robards get the tough-guy lines, and for a minute it seems as though even Lew Wallace’s political manipulations conceal a basically good Governor controlled by sinister outside interests. However, Wallace’s empathy for Garrett is also shallow political backpatting, and Garrett’s own verbal protest is inconsistent with the comfort he seeks, the comfort that has driven him to the job of sheriff in the first place. He may be offended by the money, but he is more offended by his own selling out. Later in the film Garrett’s preservation of his self-image is tied directly to his control over the Kid’s image. Garrett’s deputy Poe, forced on him by the Governor and the money men, yaps incessantly about how “Chisum is a fine man. Time’s over for drifters and outlaws, unless you got no backbone.” Fed up with Poe’s disparaging of the Kid’s way of life, Garrett replies: I’m gonna tell you this once. This country’s getting old, and I aim to get old with it. Now the kid don’t want it that way. He may be a better man for it; I ain’t judgin’. But I don’t want you explaining nothing to me, and I don’t want you saying nothing about the Kid and nobody else in my goddanmed county. (Emphasis added.) Garrett delivers the line as the men stop their horses beside a fence, accenting the choice of power and comfort that is ironically fencing Garrett in. Moreover, Garrett’s new “ownership” of the country, and the new county’s ownership of him, is consistent with his

283 need to control the Kid’s image. The historical Garrett, who published The Authentic Life ofBillvtheKid in 1882 to rebut dime-novel versions that painted the sheriff as a villain, glorified the Kid as an extension of his own heroism: Garrett claims to have known the Kid, but never mentions friendship. He (or his alleged collaborator Ash Upton) does, however, describe the Kid’s reputation, courage, and even virtue in great detail, surely to further enhance his own position as hero. The more formidable the foe slain, the greater the glory of the slayer. (Ancelet 19) Peckinpah’s Garrett, in addition to claiming a similar heroism by association with a “formidable” enemy, clearly admires the Kid and what he stands for, and Garrett’s stmggle to control the Kid’s image is partly a struggle to preserve an image of outlaw heroism even as he seeks to destroy the outlaw hero.^^ Garrett’s attempts to control the Kid’s legacy are also mirrored in his attempts to control all those with whom he comes in contact. Garrett constantly coerces others into doing his dirty work, and his giving of orders resembles Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch, who struggles to find dignity leading a band of bounty hunting carrion by bullying and belittling them. Garrett’s leadership by force is juxtaposed early on with Billy’s easy style. For example, when Billy escapes from Lincoln, while Garrett is out collecting taxes, the town watches in fascination, but when Garrett returns they become cold. Garrett, obsessed with his self-image, goes to a barber before chasing after the Kid. In the barbershop he encounters Alias, a newspaper employee and the film’s nod to the generic convention of the chronicler whose narrative function is to observe and eventually retell the legend. The conversation that ensues is comic but important in terms of the connection between Garrett’s coercion of others and the film’s self-reflexive treatment of storytelling. After Garrett sends a boy on an errand, he tums to Alias: Garrett: Who are you? Alias: That’s a good question.

Garrett is baffled by Alias’s jester response until another voice intrudes: “I believe you know me. Bill Kermit.” Kermit (Jack Elam) recounts his own exploits as a mankiller and his nickname, Alamosa Bill, before Garrett replies, “Well Bill, I’m gonna make you my

This intense identification between Garrett and Billy is the reason Tatum (1982) and Seydor (1997) read the two men as parts of a “divided self’ (Tatum 159, Seydor 277). 284 deputy” and asks the older gunfighter to get him a mess of steak and eggs. Paul Seydor has commented that naming Dylan’s character Alias aligns him with “anonymous contributors to the legend,” and Seydor notes Dylan’s “romantic” outlaw image (288). There is, however, more to the name “Alias.” The name references Dylan’s Protean iconography, an inside joke that is compatible both with the transience of the outlaw image noted by Seydor and with the general tendency of outlaws to have aliases. Secondly and more importantly, the scene suggests that Alias’s refusal to be named saves him from being forced into Garrett’s service. Alamosa Bill, who is named for his outlaw exploits, is far less lucky, and, like the boy who runs Garrett’s errand, becomes a lackey for the law. Bill’s immediate domestic job of getting Garrett some streak and eggs and, more severely, his eventual reluctant death at the hands of the Kid illustrate the seriousness of what Alias has avoided. Alias’s avoidance of Alamosa Bill’s fate has a self-consciously narrative dimension as well, for it frees Alias to be a chronicler instead of a lackey. The first encounter between Alias and Billy is in Lincoln where Billy, during his escape, draws admiration from Alias with a song comparing the relative merits of western towns, of which the BCid claims Lincoln is the worst. From this moment on Alias and Billy are aligned through ballad— i.e., Dylan’s “Billy” on the soundtrack, Dylan’s and Kristofferson’s iconographies as balladeers, the Kid’s song during the escape, and the Kid’s constant oral storytelling about past incidents between gunfighters. This ballad connection between chronicler and outlaw foregrounds the narrative position of the chronicler within the genre as well as it foregrounds the hero’s own self-promotion. With regards to the connection between Billy and Alias, one other detail of Alias’s transformation from newspaper employee to field correspondent bears mentioning. While Garrett readies himself to pursue the escaped outlaw, Alias removes his apron and hands both apron and notebook to the boy Garret has just sent on an errand. This gesture at first implies that Alias is getting ready to ride with Garrett. But it is soon revealed that Alias rides ahead to join Billy, indicating that Alias’s passing of his garb to the child represents the chronicler’s refusal to be Garrett’s errand boy.

285 The film hints at this refusal to serve in the aforementioned conversation where Garrett asks for the name of Dylan’s odd character, and the issue of naming, combined with Alias’s passing of the mantle to the errand boy, begins to reveal an important pattern in the film. Many of the names in the film’s dialogue involve people who have died in aimless gunfights, which illustrates that there is danger in “making a name for oneself,” a danger that functions at the level of narrative insofar as legend demands names of dead people. For example, Alamosa Bill’s last words, after the Kid has killed him in an unglamorous gunfight in which both men cheat, are, “At least I’ll be rem em bered.”^^ A critique of the validity of heroic legend lies in the juxtaposition of the unglamorous reality of Alamosa’s death with the tales that will use his name, but another layer of self- reflexivity interests me as well, i.e., the suggestion that the whole film is about a struggle for narrative control that reflects a stmggle for heroic leadership. Alias’s namelessness is interesting in this regard, for, as diegetic chronicler, he constantly evades the death inevitable in heroically “making a name for oneself.” Therefore, Alias’s joining Billy instead of Garrett is crucial in two respects. First, Alias’s status as chronicler provides an alternative to Garrett’s verbal boasts about the Kid’s and his own heroic image. Second, Alias chooses service to the least coercive of the two chief agonists in the film. Garrett constantly coerces others to help him, and these people consistently, like Alamosa Bill, end up dead, but Billy rarely demands help from his gang, a style of leadership that often inspires them to offer help anyway. Therefore, Alias’s choice models a narrative alternative to Garrett’s image of the Kid and also illustrates a reason why the Kid is a better heroic leader than Garrett. As is the case with the narrator Ryan in Major Dundee. Alias is an underdeveloped character, and Bob Dylan’s patently awkward zmd uimaturalistic acting style exaggerates Alias’s self-consciously stylistic place in the film. However, what development there is in the character of Alias reveals the film’s specific use of the conventional figure of the chronicler. Alias is separated from other chroniclers in outlaw westerns ranging from Jesse James (19391 to The Left-Handed Gun (1958) to Unforgiven (1992) in that his zealousness for a good story is restrained to telling glances between the chronicler and the Later, when Garrett forces another lawman named McKinney (Richard Jaeckel) to help kill the Kid at Old Fort Sumner, McKinney jokes, “Well, I hope they spell my name right in the papers.” 286 Kid. Dylan himself, however, saw less subtlety is his role. Dylan told Robert Shelton ( 1986), “I was just one of Peckinpah’s pawns There wasn’t any dimension to my part and I was uncomfortable in this nonrole...” (427). The finished movie affirms Dylan’s claim. In it he exists not so much as a character to explore in psychological depth nor even as a character actor but rather as a narrative concept. Nevertheless, to argue that Dylan is more a concept than a fully developed character is not to exclude him from the action of the plot; in fact, he is significantly intertwined with the actions of the other characters in the film. Alias’s involvement in Billy’s legend is established early on as one of action more than words. For example, the gesture in which Alias gives his apron and notebook to Garrett’s errand boy indicates that Alias will serve less as an actual diegetic reporter than as an active outlaw whose status as reporter nevertheless foregrounds the issue of narration. The film frequently refers to Alias’s abilities to master skills, a feature in direct contrast to the conventional presentation of chronicler as a physically incompetent Easterner or physically immature child. Alias initially eams Billy’s respect, for instance, in a gunfight when the chronicler kills one of Billy’s adversaries by throwing a knife through his neck! Elsewhere in the film Alias shows practical knowledge as well, at one point besting Billy at capturing live turkeys and in another scene sharpening a knife for Billy’s friend Paco (Emilio Fernandez). This is not to belittle the importance of storytelling in the film but rather to say that Alias models a specific kind of storytelling where deeds speak louder than words. Just as Billy’s deeds as heroic leader speak louder than Garrett’s coercions of deputies. Alias’s action-based status as chronicler speaks louder than Garrett’s verbal defenses of the Kid. On one hand. Alias’s greatest contribution to the Kid’s legendary status lies in the enthusiasm with which he participates in the action of the Kid’s life. On the other, Garrett’s defenses of the Kid draw attention to the inconsistencies between the sheriffs heroic self-image and his service to corrupt forces. Garrett’s bind is that killing the Kid will affirm his heroic status as lawman and killer of one of the West’s greatest gunmen but £ilso tum Garrett against an icon of the heroic code he admires and knows he is betraying. It comes as little surprise, then, that Garrett offers the Kid five days to flee the territory, because if he kills the Kid he will be a hero to some but also a destroyer of the heroic code

287 he values m ost Likewise, it comes as little surprise that Garrett consistently drags his feet in his search for the Kid. In fact, the Kid’s escape from Lincoln may be due to Garrett’s intervention. In Lincoln Billy inexplicably finds a loaded revolver in a Lincoln outhouse, which he uses to kill deputy Bell (Matt Clark). Later, when gang-member Luke (Harry Dean Stanton), surprised by the Kid’s sudden appearance, tells the Kid that the gang was just getting ready to spring him from Lincoln, the Kid replies, “I’ll save you the trip, or somebody did.” Few fit plausibly into the role of that “somebody” more than Garrett One argument might go that Garrett enables the Kid’s escape from Lincoln to add to the Kid’s exploits and, therefore, his image as Garrett’s worthy adversary. This reading by itself, however, neglects Garrett’s consistent reluctance to capture the Kid, reluctance that is part of his larger catch-22. If he kills the Kid, Garrett is damned to find heroic status as lawman only by destroying the model hero Billy. If he does not kill the Kid, however, Garrett is damned to achieve nothing but stasis. Garrett’s potential catch-22 lies in (1) his heroic failure for choosing new money and power over the Kid’s heroic lifestyle and (2) his additional heroic failure for choosing vacillation over action. In the second of these failures, Garrett is balanced opposite Alias’s active initiation into Billy’s gang. In fact. Alias becomes Garrett’s replacement. Just as Garrett bests the Kid’s shooting of chickens earlier in the film but finally looks up to the Kid’s heroic leadership. Alias becomes the new active initiate, besting Billy at turkey hunting but admiring the Kid as a heroic model. The irony in both relationships lies in the fact that Billy’s dependents, i.e., Garrett and Alias, look up to a hero who is himself of dubious merit in terms of action. When Billy rejoins his gang after escaping Lincoln, it is fitting that he tells Luke, “I figure I’ll lay back a few days, maybe more,” for Billy’s legendary status as killer of twenty-one men in twenty-one years gives way in Pat Garrett to a lugubrious, thirty- something Kid who spends most of his time loafing. Peckinpah and company’s Kid is a pretty mediocre shot who drinks, fornicates, and otherwise loiters most of the film, and at times it seems that Billy’s refusal to change for changing times is little more than a refusal to move at all. In this respect, Garrett’s dilemma is curious on two grounds: (1) Garrett’s notion that the Kid represents a more heroic existence may not be entirely accurate, and (2) Garrett’s final inclination to act on his duty as lawman puts him in chase of an adversary

288 who fails to represent much of a challenge. Alias’s admiration of the Kid is curious as well, since the chronicler appears more able-bodied than the hero himself, an ironic twist on the conventional presentation of the outlaw as exemplar of action. None of this is to say that the Kid lacks heroic leadership qualities but rather to ask the question: Leadership toward what ends? One end, though underdeveloped, lies in the Kid’s cultural alliances. As is frequently the case in the Kid’s legend, Billy is presented as a friend to the Mexican. For example, late in the film Billy’s relationship with lover Maria, played by Kristofferson’s wife Rita Coolidge, is balanced against Garrett’s escapades with prostitutes. Garrett’s interactions with four prostitutes—one Mexican, two white, one black—is presented as the sheriffs attempt to get information about the Kid, but it becomes clear that, at a deeper level, whoring is another means of vacillation for the sheriff, buying the Kid some time. Most interesting in the film’s self-consciously pornographic whorehouse scene is its racial dimension. Poe intrudes with information that the Kid is in Fort Sumner, only to find Garrett and the four women in the act of post-coital cuddling. When Poe delivers the news, the camera lingers on the responses of the women and Garrett. The white women’s glances tell Garrett to stay and leave the Kid be, while the Mexican prostitute in particular glares at Poe angrily. The typical Peckinpah association of femininity and especially Mexican femininity with the hero’s conscience lends the scene its sociopolitical charge in gendered and racialized terms. Garrett’s failures to inspire loyalty and admiration, failures balanced against the Kid’s easy relationship with Maria, are indicated in numerous features of the scene. First, the two women of color are segregated to the foot of Garrett’s bed. Secondly, Garrett, unlike Billy, has to pay for his women. Lastly, Garrett eventually agrees to ride with Poe, having the women locked in jail so they cannot warn the Kid.^^

The gender and race themes of Peckinpah’s other films abound in Fat Garrett but I would argue that they are less developed. It appears that scenes missing from any available print of the film would have strengthened a reading of these themes. In a missing scene between Garrett and his estranged Mexican wife Ida, the sheriffs wife articulates his low popularity rating with the Mexican community: “My people don’t talk to me. They say you’re getting to be too much of a gringo since you been sheriff, that you make deals with Chisum" (qtd. in Seydor 273). Ida was played by Aurora Clavell, who played hero Pike Bishop’s Mexican lover in The Wild Bunch. And the character was originally intended for Peckinpah’s second wife Begonia Palacios, which no doubt would have approached a confusion between art and life of Woody Allen proportions (Weddle 465-466). 289 One series of scenes that addresses the racial and dimension of Billy’s heroic status, occurs late in the film, beginning when Billy and his gang see off their Mexican friend Paco and his female traveling companion. After Alias sharpens Paco’s knife and the others warn him to watch out for Chisum on the way back to Old Mex, Alias and Billy discuss the possibility of Billy temporarily hiding in Mexico as well: Alias: “You could leave. You could live in Mexico.” Billy: “Could you?” Alias: “I could live anywhere. I could leave anywhere too.” Billy: “You ever been to California?” Alias: “Not yet.” Billy: “They’re sure pushing on me to go somewhere.” Alias: “Yeah, you’re leaving would sure give Garrett some size.” Billy: “I reckon he’s given me ‘bout all the time he can. Mexico might not be bad for a couple of months.” Alias: “Depends on who you are.” Billy: [Looking at Maria.] “I reckon.” A great deal is at stake in Billy’s decision, and this conversation, while poorly acted by Kristofferson and Dylan in the film, reveals many of the contradictions inherent in the heroism of Billy and his gang. While Billy’s sympathies lie with Paco and the Mexican people, there is an implication that the Kid would be out of place in Mexico. In fact, earlier in the scene, Luke warns the Kid that in Old Mex he would be “nothing but another gringo shittin’ out chili peppers and waitin’ for nothing.” Luke’s warning implies that the Kid’s status as hero lies in his “waitin’ for” Garrett instead of “nothing,” but also that the Kid’s heroic status depends on exceptional status afforded by local legend. The Kid’s status as hero to the Mexican Americans does not presuppose that he will be a hero to Mexicans, and his status as hero in Lincoln County does not necessarily translate to Old Mex. But Alias’s comment that the success of exile in Mexico “Depends on who you are” is even more mysterious than Luke’s warning. Alias’s disclaimer not only repeats Luke’s warning but also foregrounds the issue of the disparity between the Kid’s real identity and his legend, although it is unclear whether, by the end of their conversation. Alias intends to warn the Kid against leaving or challenge him to test his prowess soutli of the border. The third possibility, though no more plausible than the others, is that Alias is pointing out that the Kid’s absence from his chronicler will challenge the validity of his legend.

290 The ambiguity over what constitutes Billy’s most heroically appropriate response ultimately speaks to a larger ambiguity of the film’s early 1970s milieu. Peckinpah had been drawn to the story of Garrett and the Kid ever since his screen adaptation of Charles Neider’s Authentic Death of Hendrv Jones (1956) had been anesthetized by star and director Marlon Brando into the film One-Eyed Jacks (1961).*^ Neider’s novel plays with the mythology of the Kid and Garrett through the characters of Hendry Jones and Dad Longworth, the latter an aptly named father figure for the former. Neider’s title is a reference to Pat Garrett’s own account The Authentic Life of Billv the Kid (1882), but his novel fits nicely in a late 1950s renaissance of Billy the Kid stories, including Frazier Hunt’s biography The Tragic Davs of Billy the Kid (1956), Gore Vidal’s teleplay for NBC ‘The Death of Billy the Kid” (1955), and the Paul Newman film The Left-Handed Gun (1958), directed by Arthur Penn from the Vidal story (Tatum “Commentary” 207). Both the Newman and the Brando versions of the Kid are products of the era of juvenile delinquency. The Newman kid, in particular, explores themes of homosexuality, prevalent in Vidal’s work and many of the juvenile delinquency plots of 1950s Hollywood, while also centering on the psychopathology of the Kid and his reception as folk hero. By the time Peckinpah revisited the Kid in the early 1970s, juvenile delinquency anxieties had given way to widespread protests and a larger and more mobile youth counterculture exemplified by San Francisco’s Haight Street scene, Woodstock, and the general emergence of the hippie. The communal idealism of Woodstock (1969), however, had already been threatened by violence in 1970 at both Altamont and the Isle of Wight music festivals. The dream of the 1960s, if not “over,” as announced in the words of John Lennon’s “God” (1970), had at least been exposed to its own grim underside. Likewise, as I discuss in more detail in the chapter on Bob Dylan, the white counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s was politically complicated if not contradictory. On the one hand, this counterculture was informed by anti-war, anti-racist, anti-classist, and anti-sexist movements on the left, as well as a transnational and transcultural spirit of eclecticism, while, on the other, the hedonism of the drug culture and the vogue of self-discovery

^ Stephen Tatum’s Inventing Billv the Kid (1982) explores the versions of the Kid story from 1881 to 1981 in detail. 291 encouraged detachment even as they simultaneously encouraged tolerance and sociopolitical commitment. Peckinpah’s chemical excesses, his anti-authoritarian responses to producers and studios, his contempt for the current state of the union, and his general “fuck you” attitude made him a perfect hero for some segments of the counterculture. His extraordinary violence, sexism, inclination to hide in Mexico, and conflicts with craft unions over shooting out of the country made him a perfect enemy for others.^^ The conversation between Alias and Billy, in light of the film’s contemporary context, reveals Peckinpah’s sociopolitical ambivalences, wherein Mexico is both a revolutionary reason to fight and a place to hide, and larger sociopolitical ambivalences. Billy’s decision to leave or stay, like Paco’s decision to flee Chisum’s influence and Maria’s apparent decision to stay, hinges on Billy’s symbolic stams as hero to Mexicans first consumed by U. S. economic imperialism and then run out of the New Mexico that used to be theirs. This symbolic heroic status, however, is mixed with Billy’s need to maintain his image, a need that may have less to do with pro-Mexican sympathies than with something far more selfish. In this latter, more nihilistic and solipsistic respect. Alias is shown to be a potential apolitical influence: “I could live anywhere. I could leave anywhere too.” Alias’s embodiment of the purely Mercurial side of outlaw freedom, like that of the complex white counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, presents one of the chief ironies of the film’s association of the young gang with something better. While Garrett is a traitor to himself, the Mexicans, and the older outlaw ideal, Billy is hardly an uncomplicated example of the ideal. He struggles between what it means in heroic terms to leave or to stay, mainly because Billy’s heroism exists in a world, like the early 1970s, where a gap forms between the merits of the outlaw image for counterhegemonic politics and the aspects of the outlaw image that pertain more to irresponsibility than to sociopolitical commitment. It is probably no mistake that Billy and Alias discuss California

Referring to the director’s “100 percent Mexican crew” on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Axel Madsen reports, “craft unions have lifted their threatened boycott of the new Peckinpah film, he keeps repeating that the reasons for shooting in Mexico City were ‘organic’’’ (91). In Peckinpah’s defense, the director wanted to shoot Pat Garrett in New Mexico but caved to MOM who “preferred Mexico as a way of saving money” (Seydor 258). Anyone who has seen Alfredo Garcia’s conversely realistic and surrealistic landscape should know what Peckinpah meant by “organic.” 292 as an alternative to Mexico, because California, the western’s land of promise, was also an exemplar of the tension between political commitment and detachment in the era of the film. Billy does leave for Mexico, and his last words to Alias and the others are, “Remember me to whoever rides by.” On the trail, however, Billy finds Paco being run through with a branding iron and his female companion being raped by Chisum’s men. The branding combines with the rape insofar as both symbolize the ownership by force exemplified by the Santa Fe Ring, and Billy’s discovery of this horror motivates his return to Old Fort Sumner to face Garrett However, the sociopolitical character of this return is mixed. Billy neither takes the fight to Garrett nor to Chisum, as the scene might inspire him to do, but rather heads back to the fort where he clumsily practices shooting bottles and cans, drinks, and eventually beds down with Maria in Pete Maxwell’s place on the edge of town. In Billy’s absence, Garrett has shot and killed gang-member Holly (Richard Bright) in one of the film’s most poignant scenes. When Holly, Beaver (Donnie Fritts), and Alias accidentally encounter Garrett at Lemuel’s (Chill Wills) bar, the sheriff creates one of the western’s most emasculating moments, forcing Alias to knock Beaver unconscious with the stock of a gun and pull Lemuel’s hat down over his eyes. Alias obliges reluctantly, before Garrett forces him to “go over to that shelf of airtights, and give us a nice read, loud enough for us all to hear.” As Alias reads—“plums,” “beans,” “tomatoes,” “succotash,” “salmon”—Garrett forces Holly to get drunk until the disoriented outlaw reaches for a knife, Garrett shoots him, and Lemuel soils his drawers. Like all bullies, Garrett is motivated by insecurity. Lemuel accuses Garrett of “trying to get his bark back on [ ...] . Thinks it’s gorma make him young again, like the Kid.” Like much of Garrett’s anxiety about the Kid’s greater heroic status throughout the film, the scene at Lemuel’s is also about narrative control, and the emasculation of Alias in particular is about seizing control of the Kid’s image and Alias’s model of active chronicle. Forcing Alias to “give us a nice read” is intertwined with forcing the chronicler to abuse his friends, and for the first time in the film Alias seems painfully real, a man steeped in the mythology of male heroic action forced to betray his gang of heroic models. Garrett is aware of this painful reality, and as he exits he delivers the most damning line he could to Alias: “Boy, when you see Billy, tell him we had a little drink together.” “Boy,” used here, is clearly an

293 epithet aimed at the young chronicler who avoided becoming Garrett’s errand boy earlier in the film by speaking in riddles, and the suggestion that Alias should admit to drinking with Garrett is the sheriff’s last assault on Alias’s dignity and loyalty to the Kid. When Billy returns to Old Fort Sumner, the extent of Alias’s humiliation and his forced status as Garrett’s messenger is reinforced, as Billy, like Garrett, offers Alias a drink; Billy: [Pouring the whiskey.] “Cut the dust.” Alias: “He’s coming in, Billy.” Billy: “Yeah, I reckon. Maybe he wants to have a drink with me.” Alias does not finish his drink, and it is unclear whether Billy is joking about his own pending death, wishfully hoping that Garrett will not kill him, or needling Alias for drinking with Garrett at Lemuel’s. What is clear is that Alias is a different character, no longer the chronicler ironically teaching the hero skills of action but rather errand boy for Garrett proclaiming the inevitable death of Billy the Kid. It is fitting, then, that as the diegetic figure most obviously associated with narration is put reluctantly into Garrett’s service the director himself turns up as the casket maker Will who, carving out a child’s coffin, heckles Garrett: Garrett: “HeUo, WÜ1.” Will: “I thought you’d be out pickin’ shit with the chickens, cuttin’ yourself a tin bill. Go on, get it over with. [Garrett looks at the home of Pete Maxwell (Paul Fix).] You Imow what I’m gonna do? [Will looks down into the coffin.] Put everything I own right here, and I’m gonna bury it in this ground, and I’m gonna leave the territory. [Garrett begins walking.] When you gonna learn you can’t trust anybody, not even yourself, Garrett? You chicken-shit, badge-wearing son of a bitch!” Peckinpah’s appearance is abrupt and even forced, but this self-reflexive move is not just postmodern winking. There is a Peckinpah cynicism in the generic imperative that the Kid must die, and Peckinpah’s appearance as Garrett’s “Will” is also obviously the director commenting on his own dirty work. James Cobum claims that Sam at one point suggested, “You know, let’s not kill Billy. Let’s create a new myth” (qtd. in Fine 251). Whether Peckinpah, or Cobum for that matter, was creating a director’s iconic kinship with Garrett’s hesitation or this comment actually happened spontaneously on the set is not as important as the fact that Peckinpah, or Cobum, would ever utter such a comment to begin with. Peckinpah’s appearance in the film, whether subconsciously or consciously, 294 is a noteworthy protest against the inevitable. Will’s comments, while seemingly absurd, speak to the film’s clearest critique of Garrett’s mission. His “tin bill,’’ referring to the fraud of his badge, is pecked out of shit, and Will’s/Peckinpah’s almost incoherent bitterness acknowledges the putrid nature of his own profession as casket- and myth- maker. The Peckinpah-persona explicit in Will may hate Garrett’s betrayal of the Kid, but the director-persona protests too much. Peckinpah’s own artistic mission of laying the Kid to rest reflects, as Paul Seydor cleverly notes, the director’s abandonment of the genre, an abandonment that can be read as an attempt to move on or a cynicism about the western’s values (306). But Will’s accusation that Garrett cannot even trust himself speaks volumes coming from one of the cinema’s most paranoid talents, a director who found conspiracies, some real, in one contentious production after another. The bitterest implication at the end of Pat Garrett is that the forces of corraption that consume Garrett also consume the entire narrative—i.e., the “battleground” of its constraction and the inevitability of the plot’s conclusion—hence the frame, in which Garrett is shot in the film’s opening sequence and again after the sheriff has killed Billy. There is a determinism at work in Garrett’s final confrontation with the Kid, reflecting Peckinpah’s aforementioned curiosity with “the inevitability of Billy’s death” (qtd. in Weddle 459). Peckinpah’s image of the changing West is not that of John Wayne in Chisum (1970), where the star claims that “things usually change for the better.” Rather, Pat Garrett’s determinism reflects a larger cynicism about the ability of the outlaw to ever win in a world where old power yields new corruption. More cynical still is the possibility that the “tin bill” is not just Garrett’s fraudulent tin star but also Garrett’s “Billy,” an image of rebellion that the sheriff will admire but never follow. At the end of Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid, the sheriff pauses at the gate to Pete Maxwell’s, as he pauses earlier in the film at the gate to his own home. The conventional terror of the domestic partly explains this emphasis on the Kid’s dying in Maxwell’s kitchen. Dylan’s song “Billy” explains this much: Playin’ round with some sweet senorita Into her dark hallway she will lead ya In some lonesome shadows she will greet ya Billy, you’re so far away from home. (335)

295 But the danger of the feminine in these lines fails to account for the end of Peckinpah’s film, when Garrett waits for Billy to return from the icebox, ready to kill the Kid for daring to return home to Lincoln county. In fact, Billy’s relationships with women, as juxtaposed with Garrett’s, indicates that Billy’s real domestic danger is not feminine but rather the more corrupt, masculine threat of Chisum, Wallace, Norris, Howland, Pat Garrett, and others who are domesticating Lincoln. Wrapped up in this masculine threat is the ballad- artist himself, for storytelling in Pat Garrett is a phallocentric art In light of the threat from the artist, the last verse of Dylan’s “Billy” seems more appropriate for its self-reflexivity: Guitars will play your grand finale Down in some Tularosa alley Maybe in the Rio Pecos valley Billy, you’re so far away from home. (336) The transience of the hero is part of the romance of the ballad, as is the homelessness. In Pat Garrett, however, the construction of the ballad, whether Dylan’s construction or Peckinpah’s, is very much part of the point, and the suggestion that Billy himself is a fraud speaks to the disparity the film locates between Garrett’s and Alias’s images of the Kid and the Billy who can come back home to Lincoln to make a symbolic stand but cannot really remake his home. After Billy is killed by Garrett, Poe tries to cut off the Kid’s finger, desperate to make his own name as one on the scene of the death of Billy the Kid. Garrett screams and kicks Poe in the face, unwilling to see the Kid desecrated or any piece of the Kid owned by the likes of the deputy. As Garrett watches the coming of a new dawn, in which he will eventually die at the hands of the Santa Fe Ring, Poe’s left eye bruises. Poe looks at Alias, whose left eye squints back in the sun. Both have their visions impaired by Garrett, Poe literally and Alias through Garrett’s appropriation of his services as chronicler. Garrett himself savors his guilt for participating in the legend of the Kid and for the reasons behind his participation. He leaves with a kid throwing stones at his back, a man between worlds. He is unwilling to acknowledge that he is part of the world that hired Poe, a world where even the Kid’s body parts will be on sale. Yet, he is also unwilling to be part of Alias’s world of endless transience and irresponsibility.

296 The sociopolitical implications of Garrett’s final decision to choose neither the corrupt vision symbolized by Poe nor the forever-transient vision symbolized by Alias are subtle but noteworthy. In a sense, it is only by seizing narrative control of the Kid’s image, i.e., by killing the Kid, that Garrett can make a loafer into a legend. It is only by killing the Kid that Garrett can mount a critique of the corruption ruining Lincoln County and ruining Garrett himself. A mangled film due to studio forces beyond Peckinpah’s control, Pat Garrett, like Major Dundee, is also a self-consciously complicated exploration of the possibilities and limitations of the genre and the artist. The tensions between Peckinpah’s original critique of Nixonian corruption and Carroll’s interest in the rock ‘n’ roll counterculture synthesize in the “final” Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid to reveal a world where the outlaw hero can still be mobilized to mount a critique of powerful corruption, but where part of this critique is always waged against the fraudulence of the outlaw hero himself. Pat Garrett’s notions of the limitations of the counterculture may be accurate, especially with a little help from Peckinpah’s friends Wurlitzer and Kristofferson. But Peckinpah’s use of Dylan as a scapegoat for the irresponsible idealism of the counterculture reveals the director’s misunderstanding of just how well artists like Dylan struggled with the same anxieties as the director. Stories abound detailing Dylan’s “upstaging” of the director as the center of media attention on the set, and some would suggest that Peckinpah was jealous of Dylan. Wurlitzer, for example, purportedly claimed, “It’s happening, man. Sam knows he’s losing to Dylan” (qtd. in Shelton 427). As additional evidence that Dylan upstaged Peckinpah and that Peckinpah may not have liked it, Shelton notes, “Peckinpah arranged for a Durango screening of The Getaway, but the others decided to join Dylan for a Mexico City taping session” (427). More likely, however, than Peckinpah’s jealousy is the possibility that the director could not entirely relate to the youth counterculture, or at least that the collaborative effort of filmmaking finally conspired to prove so much. Certain decisions in the production of Pat Garrett reveal an attempt to keep Dylan’s influence aligned with the K d and the countercultural. Dylan’s song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, ” for example, is not part of the director’s cut of the film, and this exclusion says much about the use of Dylan’s iconography that I have described in this chapter.

297 In the Aubrey version of the film, the song is played during the death of Sheriff Baker (Slim Pickens), one of the old friends Garrett coerces into chasing after the Kid, against the better judgment of Baker’s Mexican wife (Katy Jurado). Most critics note that Baker, like Will, spends his time carving a vessel out of wood, a boat in which he intends to escape the territory. Baker’s death is perhaps the film’s saddest, another person wasted by Garrett who wants nothing to do with “Lincoln or them that’s a-rannin’ it” In the Aubrey version, the sheriff’s death is punctuated by the Dylan song: Mama, take this badge off of me I can’t use it anymore. It’s gettin’ dark, too dark to see I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door. (337) And: Mama, put my guns in the ground I can’t shoot diem anymore. That long black cloud is comin’ down I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door. The song is a simple evocation of Baker’s dying words—he calls his wife “Mama”—while it also articulates a common Dylan fear of playing the exploited hero. The second verse can be read as a continuation of Baker’s dying wish, or as a reference to the lawman’s antithesis, Billy, who quite literally has forgotten how to shoot his guns well and who faces a fate similar to Baker’s. Lastly, Baker’s dilemma mirrors Garrett’s insofar as Garrett’s service to the Santa Fe Ring is both reluctant and suicidal. Paul Seydor has noted that Peckinpah music collaborator Jerry Fielding could not work with Dylan because of creative differences, and Seydor claims that Dylan “at times simply didn’t know how to write music that exists to serve some other end than itself’ (266-267). The mediocre sound editing throughout both the Aubrey cut and the director’s cut may corroborate this claim, but it may just as easily indicate the uneven uses to which Dylan’s music is actually put in the film. For example, many of the refrains of “Billy” and Dylan instrumentals in the film erupt at too high a volume and in inappropriate places, a flaw that reveals Dylan’s failure to master the compositional nuances of film music but also the failure of the music Dylan did create to be adequately integrated. Nevertheless, Dylan’s music for the film, predominantly repetitious progressions of chords from “Billy” and

298 “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” does fit the themes of the film in that the circularity of the music accents the episodic, deterministic, and reluctant nature of Garrett’s search. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” excluded from the director’s cut of Baker’s death, may have seemed to Peckinpah an unnecessary concession to the popular market, but the song’s exclusion also dissociates Dylan’s iconography from the problems of Garrett or the other older character actors of the film, e.g., Pickens and Jurado. Consequently, the potential identification of the similarities between the exploited lawman hero and the exploited outlaw hero that Dylan’s song might provide are removed from the director’s cut, leaving a world of division between the young and the old. Whether it was Peckinpah or Wurlitzer who ultimately controlled the destiny of Dylan’s image in the film is hard to say. The point of exploring the self-reflexive integration of the artist “Peckinpah” into the film is not to imply that Peckinpah is the sole author of the film but rather to interrogate a period wherein reflexivity, especially when tied to the personalities of popular artists, was consistently used to foreground the possibilities and limitations of genre heroes as they reflect sociopolitical changes. Nor is the sociopolitical point of the gerue text, as I have explored it in this dissertation, solely to provide an allegorical space for social issues to hide in, though social issues do hide all over the place in these texts. Rather, the texts I have discovered through this study are bent on foregrounding the limitations of the western’s dominant heroes as an end in itself. Therefore, while Elmore Leonard, Sam Peckinpah, and Bob Dylan may have had different politics regarding any number of issues in and around the 1960s, I am intrigued by what they share. All three artists created western texts keenly aware that the western formula hero serves progressive politics of gender, race, class, and, as is the case with Dylan’s later music and Pat Garrett, generational differences in ways that are at best limited. All three artists also used the formula western as a medium for critiquing these limitations; therefore, they actually found sociopolitical possibility in the self-conscious revelation of the formula western’s sociopolitical limitations. Lastly, all three artists, though in different ways, created themselves into a sociopolitical and artistic cul de sac, wherein the reflexive critique of genre and artist affords no exit.

299 Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid is a fitting film with which to end this study insofar as both Bob Dylan and Sam Peckinpah seemed to be after some of the same excuses, and both in artistically sophisticated ways. That these similarities are not reconciled in the film’s image of Dylan speaks to the lack of awareness at the time that this pattern of reflexive failure was actually common in the genre. More recently, critics have explored allegory and self-consciousness in the western as thinly veiled indicators of the genius of genre artists or the genius of the genre itself, and no doubt my respect for the artistry of these men and the western is what drew me to this project to begin with. However, it is with the shortcomings of reflexivity and self-consciously limited heroism that I should close. This is not to disparage western artists and texts that are among the best the genre offered during the era. Rather, I note these shortcomings to illustrate a time when the most significant cultural transformations were hard for some to imagine. The 1960s found many artists straddling the threshold of generic and sociopolitical change. These were men self- conscious of their limitations and the limitations of a genre but shy of new and more imaginative frontiers.

300 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrahams, Roger D. “Some Varieties of Heroes in America.” Journal of The Folklore Institute 3 (1967): 341-362.

Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: BFIP, 1999.

Ancelot, Barry Jean. “Pat Garrett gr Billy the Kid: The Question of Blame in Legend Development.” Southwest Folklore 1.4 (19771: 18-24.

Anderson, Terry. The Sixties. New York: Longman, 1999.

Aquila, Richard. “A Blaze of Glory: The Mythic West in Pop and Rock Music.” Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture. Ed. Richard Aquila. Urbana: U of nUnois P, 1996. 191-215. —. “Introduction: The Pop Culture West.” Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture. Ed. Richturd Aquila. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 1-16.

Baez, Joan. “Joe Hill.” Woodstock. Cotillion, 1970.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Bauldie, John. Liner Notes. The Bootleg Series. Columbia, 1991.

Bazin, André. “The Evolution of the Western.” What is Cinema Volume U. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. 149-157.

—. “The Western, or the American Film par excellence.” What is Cinema Volume H. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971. 140-148. —. What is Cinema Volume n . Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.

Beebee, Thomas O. The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Studv of Generic Instability. University Park: Penn State UP, 1994. Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. 1964. New York: Delta, 1989.

301 Bindas, Kenneth J. “Cool Water, Rye Whiskey, and Cowboys: Images of the West In County Music.” Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture. Ed. Richard Aquila. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 216-239. Bliss, Michael. ‘“Back Off to What?’ Enclosure, Violence, and Capitalism in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.” Sam Peckinpah’s TTie Wild Bunch. Ed. Stephen Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 105-129. —. “The Conclusion to The Wild Bunch.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 158-168. —. Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah. Carbondale: Southern Illinois P, 1993. Bogle, Donald. Toms. Coons. Mulattoes. Mammies, and Bucks. 3rd ed. New York: Continuum, 1994. Borland, Hal. When the Legends Die. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.

Bourget, Jean-Loup. “Social Implications in the Hollywood Genres.” 1973. Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 467-474. Brauer, Ralph, with Donna Brauer. The Horse. The Gun and The Piece of Property. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green UP, 1975. Burrough, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. Introduction by John Seelye. New York: Penguin, 1990. Camus, Albert. The Mvth of Sisvphus and Other Essavs. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1955. Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.

Carroll, Noël. “The Professional Western: South of the Border.” Back in the Saddle Again: New Essavs on the Western. Eds. Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson. London: BFI P, 1998. 46-62. Cartwright, Lisa, and Nina Fonoroff. “Narrative Is Narrative: So What Is New?” Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsh. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. 124-139. Cawelti, John G. Adventure. Mvsterv. and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

—. “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films.” 1978. Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 498-511.

302 Challen, Paul. Get Dutch!: A Biography of Elmore Leonard. Toronto: ECW, 2000.

Churchill, Ward. Fantasies of the Master Race. San Francisco: City Lights, 1998.

Clark, David Anthony Tyeeme, and Joane Nagel. “White Men, Red Masks: Appropriations of ‘Indian’ Manhood in Imagined Wests.” Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West. Ed. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau. New York: Routledge, 2001. 109-130. Coyne, Michael. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. London: I. B. Tauris, 1997.

Culp, Robert “Sam Peckinpah, the Storyteller and The Wild Bunch: An Appreciation.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 3-16. Deloria, Philip J. Plaving Indian. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

Devlin, James E. Elmore Leonard. New York: Twayne, 1999.

Diddley, Bo. Bo Diddlev is a Gunslinger. Columbia, 1963.

Dobbs, Lem. “Homage to Peckinpah.” Sight and Sound 2: 16.

Doctorow, E. L. Welcome to Hard Times. New York: Random House, 1960.

Don’t Look Back. Dir. D.A. Pennebaker. 1968.

Dorn, Edward. Gunslinger. 1968. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.

Dorson, Richard M. “Davy Crockett and the Heroic Age.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 6 (1942): 95-102. “Duel at Sundown.” Maverick. 1 February 1959.

Dukore, Bernard F. Sam Peckinpah’s Feature Films. Urbana: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Dylan, Bob. The Basement Tapes. Columbia, 1975.

—. Blood on the Tracks. Columbia, 1975.

—. Bob DvlanLive 1966: The “Roval Albert Hall” Concert. Columbia, 1998.

—. Bob Dylan: The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration. Columbia Music Video, 1993. —. The Bootleg Series. Columbia, 1991.

—. Bringing It All Back Home. Columbia, 1965.

303 —. Desire. Columbia, 1976.

—, dir. Eat the Document. 1969.

—. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dvlan. Columbia, 1963.

—. Good As I Been To You. Columbia, 1992.

—. Highway 61 Revisited. Columbia, 1965.

—. John Wesley Harding. Columbia, 1968.

—. Knocked Out Loaded. Columbia, 1986.

—. Lyrics. 1962-1985. New York: Knopf, 1990.

—. Nashville Skyline. Columbia, 1969.

—. New Morning. Columbia, 1970.

—. Pat Garrett and Billv the Kid. Columbia, 1973.

—, dir. Renaldo and Clara. 1978.

—. The Times They Are A-Changin*. Columbia, 1964.

—. World Gone Wrong. Columbia, 1993.

Emmert, Scott. “Metafiction and Parody: An Undermining of Cultural Assumptions.” Loaded Fictions. Moscow, Idaho: U of Idaho P, 1996. 107-22.

Engel, Leonard. “Sam Peckinpah’s Heroes: Natty Bumppo and th Myth of the Rugged Individual Still Reign.” Literature/Rlm Quarterly 16.1 (1988): 22-30.

“The Equalizer.” The Chevenne Show. 1961.

Esselman, Kathryn C. “From Camelot to Monument Valley: Dramatic Origins of the Western Film.” Focus on the Western. Ed. Jack Nachbar. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974. 25-44. Estleman, Loren D. The Wister Trace. Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson, 1987.

Farber, Stephen. “Peckinpah’s Return.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 31-45. Fenin, George N., and William K. Everson. The Western: From Silents to Cinerama. New York: Bonanza, 1962.

Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chape! Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2(KX). 304 Fine, Marshall. Bloody Sam. New York: Donald Fme, 1991.

Flaming Star. Dir. Don Siegel. Fox, 1960.

Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel. New Haven: College and UP, 1966.

Ford, John. Chevenne Autumn. Warner Bros., 1964.

—. Fort Apache. RKO, 1948.

—. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Ford, 1962.

—. Mv Darling Clementine. Fox, 1946.

—. Rio Grande. Republic, 1950.

—. The Seachers. Warner Bros., 1956.

—. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. RKO, 1949.

—. Stagecoach. Walter Wanger, 1939.

French, Philip. Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre. New York: Viking, 1973.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1974.

Gallagher, Tag. “Shoot-Out at the Genre Corral.” Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. 246-260. Geherin, David. Elmore Leonard. New York: Continuum, 1989.

“Genisis.” Have Gun. Will Travel. 15 September 1962.

Gentnen, Richard, and Diane Birdsall. “Peckinpah: Cutter.” Film Comment 17.1 (1981): 35-37. Glennon, Lorraine, ed. Our Times: The Illustrated History of the 20th Century. Atlanta: Turner, 1995.

Grey. Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage. 1912. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1996.

The Gunfighter. Dir. Henry King. Fox, 1950.

Guthrie, Woody. Dust Bowl Ballads. 1940. Buddha, 2000.

—. Library of Congress Recordings. 1940. Rounder, 1988.

Hampton, Wayne. Guerrilla Minstrels. Knoxville: U of Tennesee P, 1986.

305 Hardy, Phil. The Overlook Encyclopedia: The Western. Woodstock: Overlook P, 1995.

Harmetz, Aljean. “Man Was a Killer Long Before He Served God.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 169-176. Harris, Norman. The Sixties: A Black Chronologv. Athens, Georgia: Black Resource Center, 1990. Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape. 1974. 2nd. ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. —. ‘T m a Film Critic First and a Feminist Second.” Interview with F. Anthony Macklin. Film Heritage 11.2 (Winter 1975-1976): 13-33.

Heatherington, Madelon. “Romance Without Women: The Sterile Fiction of the American West.” Under the Sun: Mvth and Realism in Western American Literature. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum. Troy, New York: Whitson, 1985. 74-91. Henderson, Brian. “The Searchers: An American Dilemma.” Film Ouarterlv 34.2 (Winter 1980-1981): 9-23. “Hey Boy’s Revenge.” Have Gun. Will Travel. 1958

Heylin, Clinton. Bob Dvlan: The Recording Sessions. 1960-1994. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1995. High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. United Artists, 1952.

Higson, Charles. “The Shock of the Old.” Sight and Sound 5 (August 1995): 36.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. New York: Dell, 1969.

Hombre. Dir. Martin Ritt. Fox, 1967.

“The Hostage.” Wanted: Dead or Alive. 1959.

Irons, Glenwood, ed. Gender. Language, and Mvth. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.

Jackson, Bruce. Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1974.

Jackson, Ronald J. Classic T.V. Westerns. New York: Citadel P, 1994.

Jager, Andreas. “Self-Referentiality in Twentieth-Century Poetry: Some Critical Approaches.” Self-Referentialitv in 20th Century British and American Poetry. Eds. Detlev Gohrbandt and Bruno von Lutz. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996. 7-21. Jameson, Richard T. “Introduction.” Film Comment 17.1 (1981): 33-35.

Jesse James. Dir. Henry King. Fox, 1939. 306 Johnny Guitar. Dir. Nicolas Ray. Republic, 1954.

Kael, Pauline. “The Wild Man; Remembering Sam Peckinpah.” The New Yorker 8 November 1999: 98-101. Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. New York: Harper, 1994.

Kitses, Jim. “The Wild Bunch.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale; Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 74-79. —. Horizons West: Anthony Mann. Budd Boetticher. Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship Within the Western. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lav of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “From From Caligari to Hitler.” 1947. Film Theory and Criticism. E ^ . Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 21-33. —. “From Theory of Film.” 1960. Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 249-259. Kristofferson, Kris. Singer/Songwriter. Columbia, 1991.

Kurosawa, Akira. Hidden Fortress. 1958.

—. Rashomon. 1950.

—. Seven Samurai. 1954.

Leonard, Elmore. “The Captives.” 1955. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories. New York: Delta, 1998. 16-53. —. “The Colonel’s Lady.” 1952. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories. New York: Delta, 1998. 87-102. —. Elmore Leonard’s Western Roundup # 2: Escape From Five Shadows. Last Stand at Saber River. The Law at Randado. New York: Delta, 1998.

—. Elmore Leonard’s Western Roundup # 3: Valdez Is Coming. Hombre. New York: Delta, 1999. —. Forty Lashes Less One. Toronto: Bantam, 1972.

—. “The Hard Way” 1953. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories. New York: Delta, 1998. 184-197. . —. Mr. Majestvk. New York: Mysterious P, 1974. 307 — . “The Nagual.” 1956. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories. New York: Delta, 1998. 295-311. —. “Only Good Ones.” 1961. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories. New York: Delta, 1998. 54-68. —. “The Tonto Woman.” 1982. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories, New York: Delta, 1998. 1-15. Lenihan, John H. Showdown: Confronting Modem America in the Western Film, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 428-44.

Lumer, Robert. “Pete Seeger and the Attempt to Revive the Folk Music Process.” Popular Music and Society 15.1 (Spring 1991): 45-59.

Lund, Jens, and R. Serge Denisoff, “The Folk Music Revival and the Counter Culture: Contributions and Contradictions.” Journal of American Folklore 84 (1971): 399.

Lyons, Paul. New Left. New Right, and the Legacv of the Sixties. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. Madsen, Axel. “Peckinpah in Mexico.” Sight and Sound 43 (Spring 1974): 91.

The Magnificent Seven. Dir. John Sturges. United Artists, 1960.

Maltby, Richard and Ian Craven. “Genre.” Hollvwood Cinema. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 107-43. Man, Glen. Radical Visions / American Film Renaissance. 1967-1976. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 1994. Marcus, Greil. Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. New York: Holt, 1997.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.

Mast, Gerald, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds. “Film Genres.” Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 429-433. McKinney, Doug. Sam Peckinpah. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Meldrum, Barbara Howard. “Introduction.” Old West—New West. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum. Moscow, Idaho: U of Idaho P, 1993. 1-12. —. “Introduction.” Under the Sun: Mvth and Realism in Western American Literature. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldmm. Troy, New York: Whitson, 1985. 1-9.

308 Metz, Leon. John Weslev Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. Miller, Jim. “Bob Dylan.” The Sixties. Ed. Peter Stine. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988. 52-68. Miller, Mark Crispin. “In Defense of Sam Peckinpah.” Film Ouarterlv 28.3 (Spring 1975): 2-17. Mingus, Charles. Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. Candid, 1960.

Murphy, Kathleen and Richard T. Jameson. “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.” Film Comment 17.1 (1981): 44-48.

Nachbar, Jack. “Introduction.” Focus on the Western. Ed. Jack Nachbar. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974. 1-8. —. “Riding Shotgun: The Scattered Formula in Contemporary Western Movies.” Focus on the Western. Ed. Jack Nachbar. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974. 101-112. Nash, Gerald. “New Approaches to the American West.” Old West—New West. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum. Moscow, Idaho: U of Idaho P, 1993. 15-27. Neale, Steve. “Questions of Genre.” Screen 31:1 (Spring 1990): 46-7.

—. “Vanishing Americans: Racial and Ethnic Issues in the Interpretation and Context of Post-War ‘Pro-Indian’ Westerns.” Back in the Saddle Again: New Essavs on the Western. Eds. Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson. London: BFI P, 1998, 8-28. Neider. Charles. The Authentic Death of Hendrv Jones. 1956. Reno: U of Nevada P, 1993. Nordyke, Lewis. John Weslev Hardin: Texas Gunman. New York: William Morrow, 1957. Nyman, Jopi. Men Alone: Masculinitv. Individualism, and Hard-Boiled Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” “Where Are You Going. Where Have You Been?”: Selected Earlv Stories. Princeton: Ontario Review P, 1993. 118-136. Ommundsen, Wenche. Metafictions? Reflexivitv in Contemporarv Texts. Melbome: Melbome UP, 1993. Ondaatje, Michael. The Collected Works of Billv the Kid. New York: Vintage, 1970.

The One-Eved Jacks. Dir. Marlon Brando. Paramont, 1961.

309 “One on the House.” The Restless Gun. 1959.

Orman, John. The Politics of Rock Music. Chicago: Nelson-Hail, 1984.

Parks, Rita. The Western Hero in Film and Television / Mass Media Mythology. Arm Arbor: UMI Research P, 1982. Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Studv of the Indian and the American Mind. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Peckinpah, Sam, dir. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. United Artists, 1974.

—. Major Dundee. Columbia, 1965

—. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. MGM, 1973.

—. Ride the High Countrv. MGM, 1962.

—. Straw Dogs. ABC, 1971.

—. The Wild Bunch. Warner Bros., 1969.

Penn, Arthur, dir. Bonnie and Clyde. Warner Bros., 1967.

—. The Left-Handed Gun. Warner Bros., 1958.

Peredes, Américo. “With a Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: U of Texas P, 1959. Perry, Charles. “The Sound of San Francisco.” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. Eds. Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke. New York: Random House, 1992. 362-369. Prince, Stephen. “Introduction.” Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Stephen Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 1-36. —. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

—. Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998. Rainey, Buck. Western Gunslingers in Fact and on Film. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998. Reuss, Richard. “Folk Music and Social Conscience: The Musical Odyssey of Charles Seeger.” Western Folklore 38.4 (1979): 236.

Riley, Tim. Hard Rain. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Robeson, Paul. The Political Years. Magnum, .

310 Robbins, Marty. Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. Columbia, 1959.

—. More Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. Columbia, 1961.

Robinson, Forrest G. Having It Both Wavs: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1993.

Rodnitsky, Jerome. “Also Bom in the USA: Bob Dylan’s Outlaw Heroes.” Popular Music and Society 12.2 (Summer 1988): 37-44.

Sarchett, Barry W. “The Outlaw Figure, the Figure as Outlaw: Narrativity and Interpretation in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” New Orleans Review 19:3-4 (1992): 174-181.

Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” 1972. Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 585-605. Scaduto, Anthony. Dvlan: An Intimate Biographv. New York: Signet, 1971.

Schaefer, Jack. Shane. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.

Schatz, Thomas. Hollvwood Genres: Formulas. Filmmaking, and the Studio Svstem. New York: Random House, 1981. Schrader, Paul. “Sam Peckinpah Going to Mexico.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southern minois UP, 1994. 17-30. Seydor, Paul. Peckinpah: The Westem Films: A Reconsideration. 1980. Urbana; U of minois P, 1997. —. “Sam Peckinpah.” Sight and Sound 5 (October 1995): 19-23.

—. “The Versions of The Wild Bunch.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 46-73. —. “The Wild Bunch as Enic.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 113-158. —. “The Wild Bunch: The Screenplay.” Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Stephen Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 37-78. Shane. Dir. George Stevens. Paramont, 1953.

Shelton, Robert. No Direction Home. New York: Beech Tree, 1986.

311 Simmons, Gamer. Peckinpah. A Portrait in Montage. Austin: U of Texas P, 1976.

Simon, Roger. “Intertextuality and the Westem: The Case of Hombre as Novel and Film.” Varieties of Filmic Expression. Kent, Ohio: Romance Language Department Kent State, 1989. 14-23. Simons, John L. “The Tragedy of Love in The Wild Bunch.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southem Illinois UP, 1994. 90-112. Sharrett, Christopher. “Peckinpah the Radical: The Politics of The Wild Bunch.” Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Ed. Stephen Prince. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 79-104. The Shooting/Ride in the Whirlwind. Dir. Monte Heilman. 1966.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Mvth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Centurv America. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Mvth. 1950. New York: Vintage, 1957. Spitz, Bob. Dylan. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989.

Sragow, Michael. “Sam Peckinpah, 1925-1984.” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southem minois UP, 1994. 177-190. Steckmesser, Kent Ladd. The Westem Hero in History and Legend. Claremont, California: Regina, 1965. Stevens, Jay. “The Counterculture.” The Sixties. Ed. Peter Stine. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988. 120-156. Stmg, Cordell. “The Wild Bunch and the Problem of Idealist Aesthetics, or. How Long Would Peckinpah Last in Plato’s Republic?” Doing It Right / The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Ed. Bliss, Michael. Cardondale: Southem minois UP, 1994. 80-89. Tatum, Stephen. Commentary. The Authentic Death of Hendrv Jones. Reno: U of Nevada P, 1993. 206-211. —. Inventing Billv the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America 1881-1981. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1982. Thomson, David. “Warren Oates.” Film Comment 17.1 (1981): 41.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. 1920. Foreword by Ray

312 Allen Billington. New York: Holt, 1962. Tuska, Jon. “The American Westem Cinema: 1903-PresenL” Focus on the Western. Ed. Jack Nachbar. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974. 25-44. —. The American West in Film / Critical Approaches to the Western. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 1985. Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Bros., 1992.

Vagabond. Dir. Agnes Varda. 1985.

Wade, Richard C. The Urban Frontier The Rise of Westem Cities. 1790-1830. 1959. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. Ward, Ed. “The Sound of Texas.” The Rolling Stone Dlustrated History of Rock and Roll. Eds. Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke. New York: Random House, 1992. 252-259. Warshow, Robert. “Movie Chronicle: The Westemer.” 1954. Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 453-66. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984. Weddle, David. “If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!”: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah. New York: Grove, 1994. Westbrook, Max. “Myth, Reality, and the American Frontier.” Under the Sun: Mvth and Realism in Westem American Literature. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum. Troy, New York: Whitson, 1985. 10-19. The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage. Dir. Paul Seydor and Nick Redman. Warner, Bros., 1996. Wister, Owen. The Virginian. 1902. New York: Airmont, 1964.

Wood, Robin. “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” 1977. Film Theory and Criticism. Eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 475-85.

Wright, Judith Hess. “Genre Films and the Status Quo.” 1974. Film Genre Reader IT. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. 41-49. Wright, Will. Six-Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Westem. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975. Yoggy, Gary A. Riding the Video Range: The Rise and Fall to the Westem of Television. Jefferson, North Caroline: McFarland, 1995.

313