Through the Post 9/11 Lens: Reconfiguring Masculinity and Identity in Neo Westerns.
Fig 1.1: Sidney Nolan. “Ned Kelly” 1946. National Gallery of Australia. Canberra
Maurita Dumbill 11104287 Masters in Media Studies: Film Studies Dr Abraham Geil & Dr MarieAude Baronian
Content
Introduction 2
Chapter One 8
Hero? Myth? Man
Chapter Two 23
Old lawman. New evil
Chapter Three 40
Triumph of the oilman?
Chapter Four 53
Bearman
Conclusion 72
List of figures 74
Bibliography 77
1 Introduction
The classical western1 is crucial to sustaining an American identity which is repeatedly under attack. As the genre is dynamic, it is able to portray malleable ideals of masculinity and identity. Film historian Peter C. Rollins argues westerns have created “an American culture...almost unimaginable without the West as a touchstone of national identity.”2 Within this seemingly orthodox genre, the western investigates crucial social issues at the crux of American society. Westerns have been used “as a means of making historical and cultural inferences about collective fantasies shared by large groups of people and of identifying differences in these fantasies from one culture or period to another.”3 Neo westerns acknowledge the traditions and formations of the classical western but critique and update the conventions, nostalgia and traditions of the genre in a contemporary sphere. Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2 claims the neo western changed assumptions of nation building and identity configuration post World
War II and to progress this notion, I believe neo westerns, post 9/11 criticise archetypal American values and thus become an emblem for “modern political cinema.”4 As such, at a time of national selfreflection, the neo western can reflect upon the positive national mythologies embodied in the classic western; community, family, religion and openness. Del Jacobs claims that the neo western “keeps alive the basic elements and cliches of the traditional Western while still allowing them room for modification.”5 Neo westerns certainly subvert and distort many of the typical codes which explicitly define the western genre.
1 I will use westerns in lowercase “w” throughout this thesis, citing Wallman’s view that the western as a genre “should be written in the lower case just as all other genres.” Wallman, Jeffrey. The Western: Parables of the American Dream. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press. Print. 1999. p13 2 Rollins, Peter C., Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television and History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Print. 2005. p2 3 Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. University of California Press. Print. 2014. p7 4 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Print. 1989. p218 5 Jacobs, Del. Revisioning Film Traditions — The PseudoDocumentary and the NeoWestern. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Print. 2000. p 60.
2 6 Whereas classic westerns move from heroic action towards resolution, community and national identity,; neo westerns evince a disjointed sense of peoples not already defined and labelled but still emerging and creating a sense of itself.7 Rather than assuming, as classic westerns do, that the past is knowable and subjugated, the neo western questions America’s homogeneity, hegemony, mythic discourses and structured patriarchy. Unlike classic westerns, neo westerns do not assume that the past is knowable and subjugated. Instead they question America’s homogeneity, hegemony, mythic discourses and structured patriarchy. Hence, when the neo western restates or remembers tropes and styles established under antecedent forms of the classic western, it does so not to belabour their timelessness or essential significance to identity, masculinity and nation, but to readjust focus on them to evaluate and expose these assumptions. Perhaps the neo western can reflect upon the traditional concepts that the classic western has created whilst developing a new type of film which critically bisects those traditions in a transnational and mediated age.
Protective paternal masculinities are affiliated with the discourse of American national identity that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 and the resulting war on terror. Scholars have noted the emergence of the “icon of neomacho man” and other cultural attempts “to right the applecart of traditional gender roles.”8 Susan Faludi’s treatise on post 9/11 culture delineates how in times of turmoil, males are elevated to become protectors and as a result, feminist discourse is sidelined. As such, male orientated action comes to the fore of popular culture and thus, mediations of masculinity are complicit in a discursive conquest of feminism whilst perpetuating, recuperating and commemorating the discourses of involved fatherhood granted by postfeminism. Constructions of masculinity in western films often mirror gendered, racial and social conflicts of the period and consequently, “the role of the masculine protector puts those
6 Films in which adhere to the classic western genre typically display least three tropes. Firstly there is always a hero who displays morally good qualities. Secondly, each film has a villain who serves as an antagonist to the hero. Finally, each film follows a narrative between which good and evil are put to play, ultimately with the hero prevailing. overview of western literature. See Robert Stam and Ella Shohat: Unthinking eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media and Rick Altman: Film/Genre. 7 Colebrook, Claire. Understanding Deleuze. Crowns Nest: Allen and Unwin. Print. 2002. P 119 8 Melnick, Jeffrey. 9/11 Culture. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Print. 2011. p223
3 protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience.”
9 Iris Young also identified a congruent “logic of masculinist protection”10 in the intensified conservatism of the Bush presidency’s gender ideology while Stephen J. Ducat points to a “cultural remasculinization” through “the revivification of “heroic” manhood” which brought in “a new era of defeminized men.”11
However, conservative commentator Peggy Noonan proclaimed that “from the ashes of 9/11, arise the manly virtues which promoted a resurrection of the masculine ideal which prompted similar rallying cries.”12 In illustrating how ideas of masculinity in America were shaped by classic westerns, I will appraise the ways in which contemporary masculine concerns permeate and affect neo westerns.
I will utilise R.W. Connell’s theories on masculinity as they revolve around body reflexive practices, performed and produced maleness and have helped lay the groundwork for subsequent studies of gender. Connell is interested in masculinity in terms of performed and produced maleness and has commented on the western claiming that “exemplars of masculinity are men of the frontier.”13 She also puts to use Michel Foucault’s theory in discussing hegemonic masculinity, whereby identities are socially constructed and nonessential; masculinity is socially constructed, it is therefore pliant. “Hegemonic masculinity establishes its hegemony partly by its claim to embody the power of reason, and thus represent the interest of the whole society.”14 However, like westerns themselves, the concept of hegemonic masculinity can been adapted to fit the needs of ever evolving discourses in a variety of fields.
Through discussing redefinitions of masculinity, I will see whether the theory of hegemonic masculinity has been adapted to fit the archetypal masculine American national identity. Finally, I will argue the
9 Young, Iris Marion. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State” in W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender. Duke University Press. 2007. Print. P 116 10 Ibid. P115 11 Ducat, Stephen J. The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. Boston: Beacon Press. Print. 2004. p227 12 Noonan, Peggy. “Welcome Back Duke” Wall Street Journal. October 12, 2001. Accessed 29 April 2016.
4 national imaginary and evaluate this through masculinity as a construct in America post 9/11. I will demonstrate that the neo western is associated with a need for masculine individual regeneration as well as a remasculinisation of the national ego in times of turmoil and show there has been a shift in hyper masculine national identity.
The western is a uniquely American genre: the concept of the West represents the founding of the country, an idealised version of the American Dream in which Americans believed they could achieve anything on a new frontier. It is not surprising that after September 11th 2001, filmmakers seem to have revisited the genre in search of a clearer America and a clearer view of masculinity. Essentially this is impossible to determine; the four films I will analyse do not aid in depicting a transpicuous version of masculinity or American identity, but present in all of them is a yearning for this. In 2008, there was an influx of neo westerns; a remake of the 1957 3:10 to Yuma, Blue Eyes, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. In this thesis, I analyse the latter three films aforementioned along with the more recent The Revenant (2015), in four separate chapters. Present in these films are men who do not function as individuals but rather as a reaction to other men. Direct conflict between pairs men pervade all four films and as such, autonomy in neo westerns is depicted as a myth due to this autonomy being dependent upon other men. In exploring the recreation of gendered American national identity I will demonstrate how these four films interrogate masculinity in a cultural context which is being newly asserted and recurrently undergoing crisis. I will analyse how threats to America’s physical security can be formulated as a threat on masculinity itself and thus investigate if there has been a reimagining of masculine ideology.
Chapter one focuses on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007) which reinforces Laura Mulvey’s Lacanian analysis of the male hero, representative of an ideal ego on the cinema screen. I will explore the ways bodily unity on screen relates to a concept of mirror identification and thus, how neo westerns can be seen to function as a mode of representation that
5 can turn illusion into identity. Moreover, I will also explore Judith Butler’s concept of gender in the chapter to investigate the complicity between masculinity, western iconography and the cultural implications of this. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford depicts Robert Ford’s fanatical obsession of Jesse James though the myth exposed leads to Ford shooting his hero in the back of the head. This is an apt metaphor for the neo western’s own violent demythologising.
Whereas chapter one explores the performance of the myth of the masculine figure, chapter two on No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) examines a film that is arguably about the failure of this myth. The film depicts a precipitous degeneration in the moral fiber of American society where the security of its citizens has become a virtual anachronism. Due to its lack of resolution or reaffirmation, the film does not confront uncertainties and conflict values which cause anxiety to 21st century Americans. For Matthew Carter, the film becomes a “critique of the influence that the myth of the
West holds over the sociopolitical trajectory of the presentday United States in its role as the world’s figurative lawman.”15 Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) lacks agency and does not deliver justice to his community. As such, Bell “manages to transcend his fate by recognising his own limitations as a lawman and the realisation he is not a hero.”16 Sheriff Ed Tom Bell never confronts the murderer; there is no final showdown, as in the classic western. Whereas No Country for Old Men grounds evil and violence in a remorseless nature, There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) roots greed, violence and madness in a capitalist society which is undermined by the pillars of religion and family. Chapter three assesses the juxtaposition between religion and capitalism as played out by two avaricious egocentric adversaries at the turn of the twentieth century. I will show how this film depicts surrogate family relationships in an inimical capitalistic realm as well as illustrating that the pursuit of oil can only result in blood. Chapter four concentrates on a stage for male power in conflict with both the wilderness and an
15 Carter, Matthew. Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood's Frontier Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Print. 2015. p196 16 Ibid p 206
6 adversary as shown in The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015). The vision of a natural man from a new perspective deconstructs the traditional “natural” manliness of the western hero and indicates a new attitude towards the hero. Nature is the one transcendent element in the film; the one portrayed as immense and the ideal towards which human nature strives and is the contemporary return to the concept of America as a frontier wilderness, as well as an reenactment of the American dialectic between civilisation and nature. I will assess how men’s fear of losing their mastery and identity, both of which neo westerns constantly reinvent, is explored in this conflict of man vs the wilderness.
7 Hero? Myth? Man
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford gives an account of how the western masculine myth is an active agent on the interpretation of men’s masculinity and their vision of themselves, illustrating the inimical role the western has in creating masculinity. I believe it is imperative to analyse the myth of Jesse James himself in order to see which route this masculinity has taken.
However, that is not to state contemporary society's definitions of masculinity are more informed today than any denotations which antecede it, or that society's definitions of masculinity will indicatively alter due to a western, but rather contemporary society abides in reflecting ideal manhood in neo westerns.
Perhaps the challenge that Andrew Dominik faced was to accommodate the want for a regenerated manhood. Dominik uses doubling, gaze and identification which makes explicit how repetition is used to confirm masculinity in and by means of the western. The film tells concentrates upon Jesse James’s (Brad
Pitt) murder by Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) who imitates Jesse’s habits, mannerisms and physical appearance. After shooting Jesse, and hoping to replicate his hero status within society, Ford becomes a minor celebrity in a theatre show in which he presents himself as James’s killer, whilst Ford’s brother plays Jesse’s role. Reflecting on the performativity of genre and gender construction and the male gaze focused upon other men, the film explores how the myth of manhood has been created and reproduced.
Through depicting the events after the normal conclusion of a Western (shootout) and through illustrating the fate of Jesse’s killer, The Assassination of Jesse James provides the missing link between social memory and reconstructed histories that Westerns traditionally disguise. The film therefore engages, at a metalevel, a revision of history. In Paul Connerton’s How Societies Remember, he describes this process:
8 We identify a particular action by recalling at least two types of context for that action. We situate the agents’ behavior with reference to its place in their life history; and we situate that behavior also with reference to its place in the history of social settings to which they belong. The narrative of one life is part of an interconnecting set of narratives; it is embedded in the story of those groups from which individuals derive their identity.17
Identity, according to Connerton, is necessarily linked to the narratives of others. This is a perfect description of the plot of Dominik’s film, where Ford defines his character through the prism of Jesse
James. When Ford finally kills James, and Ford is subsequently shot by O’Kelly, the murder motif repeats in order to show the inherently linked causation between past, present, and future selves of identity. The narrator states, “By his own approximation, Bob assassinated Jesse James over 800 times. He suspected no one in history had ever or so often or so publicly recapitulated an act of betrayal.” In this way, the film is alluding to its own constructed mythological roots akin to those of the play Ford acts in: people watch the performance and reconstruct the situations as fact. Those facts then become more powerful than other depictions as they are disseminated throughout mainstream culture, and eventually the fabrication becomes truthlike. Foucault, in his discussion of film and popular memory, ponders the complexity of politically charged historical recreation films, which I suggest The Assassination of Jesse James adheres to; “The problem’s not the hero, but the struggle. Can you make a film about a struggle without going through the traditional process of creating heroes? It is a new form of an old problem.”18 Foucault discusses the contesting truths of historical versus constructed histories as in important part of standard narrative that comprises social histories: myth and memory are utilised by the film to reflect on conceptions of history as fluid and dynamic. “This is one way of reprogramming popular memory, which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been.”19
17 Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print. 1989. p21 18 Foucault, Michel. “Film and Popular Memory.” Foucault Live (Interviews, 19611984) Ed. Lotringer, Sylvere. New York: Semiotext(e). 1989. Translated by Martin Jordin. p62 19 Ibid. p62
9 Nostalgia, in The Assassination of Jesse James is not just a yearning for a historical past and for the old West, but also for the masculine narcissism which Pitt represents. Paradoxically, the privilege of film as being an instant form of nostalgia is the current representation of current events on film. The visuality of the medium allows for audiences to conflate remembered and actual instances as being one and the same. Westerns also tend to engage on mythology far more frequently than historiography.
However, western mythology is set in a pseudohistorical framework which often camouflages its mythographic project.20 Philip French has argued that the western is about America reinventing and reinterpreting her own past,21 yet through the realist strategy of narration that fuses the historical and the discursive. Jesse James, as an American legend, is that of a cultural phenomenon so dispersed in
American popular culture that any endeavour for historical ambiguity is almost rendered impossible.
There have been numerous portrayals of the legend of Jesse James, from King's Jesse James (1939) to Mayfield's American Outlaws (2001). These unremitting remakes illustrate the mythic depictions of Jesse James which capitalise on large scale political, social and historical themes. Andrew Dominik's retelling of the Jesse James story illustrates the difficulties of retelling the past reliably. Indeed, the legend of the man is wholly at odds with most accounts of his actual life. However, the legendary gunslinger Jesse
James has a part in the American national identity much akin to that of Robin Hood. A trainrobbing bandit who lived from 1847 to 1882, James was a showman who usually targeted the money of large banks and companies rather than simply holding up ordinary people. This, combined with his popular association with the postCivil War Confederate resistance, turned him into a legend in his own lifetime.
And, as with all such figures, it was his untimely and unusual death that sealed his immortality.
The gaze which passes from Robert Ford to Jesse James questions Laura Mulvey's notion of the cinematic gaze which she discusses in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. This has been capitalised upon by Steve Neale and Paul Willemen who both claim the heterosexual male gaze can be fixed upon
20 Walker, Janet. Westerns Through History. London: Routledge. Print. 2013. p31 21 French, Philip. “Thoroughly modern Marie” The Observer. 22 October 2006.
10 male characters, especially when the genre of the western is congested with male bodies and absent of female characters. Neale explores the implication of Mulvey’s observation about the sadistic nature of the cinematic gaze for issues of masculinity, arguing that the male body in popular imagery is feminised and objectified by the viewer. Contrary to Mulvey’s notion, Neale focuses upon the narcissistic identification of males from an early stage of recognition, to the idea that the ego is sustained by the powerful and omnipresent representation in westerns. The gaze, therefore, has to move away from the scopophilic
(pleasure in looking) male gaze to identification of the viewer's self, not only with the central character, but to varying degrees, all characters. Neale states when a male is looking at another male performing body on the screen, Mulvey's scopophilia is superseded by a fetishistic look, in which the male spectator identifies with the object of his gaze. In no other genre is this more fitting than the western, since the male gaze is no longer directed to the female body as Mulvey claims, rather to another male, as the “ideal ego.”
22 The western presents “an obsession with images and definitions of masculinity and masculine codes of behaviour, and with images of male narcissism.”23 This narcissism which relates to phantasies is especially prevalent in The Assassination and is, as Mulvey claims, the “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego.”24 The mythic interpretation of Jesse James as the people’s hero is deconstructed and the film illustrates how this position is harmful through depicting Jesse as a man uncertain of his place as a bandit and a killer.
In the wake of Butler’s understanding of gender, the film reinforces the idea that gender is a performative construction and shows the different stages through which Bob passes in his attempt to perform as Jesse James. First reading dime novels, then collecting objects, later physically copying and quoting Jesse’s rhetoric, Bob prepares to substitute the original Jesse. In this way the film shows that imagination and processes of copying or performing are active and creative, and demonstrates that the
22 Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3). Autumn 1975. pp6 18 23 Neale, Steve. Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema. Screen 24 (6). December 1983. p15 24 Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3). Autumn 1975. pp6 18
11 relation between the western and masculinity is not natural but constructed. Defining masculinity through this process becomes doubly performative, since Bob is copying something that is a fantasy of his own idolising vision, in its turn generated by the mythopoetic discourse of the dime novels he reads. The audience meets Bob after he has already passed through and consumed the cultural process by which he recognises Jesse as a model to imitate. Furthermore, Bob Ford’s young age in Dominik’s film (he is nineteen) makes processes of gendered identity building and the gaze of western masculinities easier to investigate. It is probably as a consequence of his young age that Bob is unable to recognise his fascination with Jesse as a process fostered by cultural products; quite the opposite, he is prey to a desire to look, touch, and consume Jesse’s persona, wanting to achieve that outstanding masculinity he sees in
Jesse as a step towards his entrance into the world of men. The ideal ego may be the model with which the subject, here Bob Ford, identifies to and to which it inspires, may also be a source of further images and feelings of castration inasmuch as that ideal is something to which the subject is never adequate. This permeates Mulvey's notion narcissistic images of masculinity which is the contradiction between narcissism and the law, between an image of authority and social authority, an argument which she grounds in the western.
Through investigating the character of Bob Ford, The Assassination cautions against the harmful consequences of mythic visions of masculinity and legitimising models. Rather than being exclusively an empowering device, male to male gaze as proposed in and by the western may have detrimental consequences for the development of paradigms of masculinity. As much as processes of copying are considered, Bob does not only venerate his hero, but as a young man finding his way into manhood he also tries to reproduce Jesse’s gestures and way of talking to train his body to physically perform Jesse James. As we learn from the voiceover, “if Jesse palavered with another person, Bob secretaried their dialogue, getting each inflection, reading every gesture and tick, as if he wanted to compose a biography of the outlaw, or as if he were preparing an impersonation.” Citing Butler’s claim
12 that gender is “instituted through a stylised repetition of acts”25 Bob’s obsessive study and copying of
Jesse James points out the repetitive and performative character of creative processes of masculinity. The voiceover informs us Bob was “renowned at twenty as Jesse was after fourteen years of Grand Larceny” and could be “identified correctly by more citizens than could the President of the United States.” Instead of representing a moment of triumph, Bob's performance reiterates his failure to become the man he wanted to be. Butler contends that “the act that one does, the act that one performs, is in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene.”26 There is also additional aspect of the performative aspects of identity in the one year later sequence after the assassination, where Robert Ford and his brother Charley are infamous actors in New York in performing the legendary assassination on stage for audiences. Now, the gaze has been inverted, and the brothers are looked upon by the viewing public. However, not even on stage can Bob realise his dream of becoming Jesse and in the repetitive creation he becomes like Jean Baudrillard suggests, a simulacrum of himself. The Assassination therefore, is an elegy to the extremity of the legend and the myth whilst simultaneously leaving nostalgia of traditional forms of masculinity behind. Dominik questions the processes which have created a mythic discourse of the West; dime novels, theatre performances and cinema as the medium that narrates the story the viewer is presented with.
Dominik’s film reflects upon the reenactment ritual of cinematic experience as both critical to the genre of westerns as well as being indicative of a necessary national process. The film provides a national narrative of individual heroism and the explanation for Jesse James’s longevity in the American consciousness lies in the myth’s adaptability, flexibility and considerable narrative variation over time and across a broad social and cultural spectrum. The Assassination of Jesse James examines the process of myth building with imagery that recalls its folklore roots while simultaneously questioning the
25 Butler, Judith. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1988) 26 ibid.
13 authenticity of both imagery and narrative. The voiceover yields Jesse James role as an outlaw yet simultaneously, recedes that which makes him a legend. The facts about Jesse refer to his homes, city life, to his wounded body and to his family life. These are facts which are not part of James's mythic status; facts which have been banished from collective memory. The voiceover narration also provides numerous hyperboles that elaborate on the mythic experience of Jesse as experienced by Bob: “If he neared animals, they retreated. Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rain fell straighter, clocks slowed.” In deceiving the audience, perhaps in order to illustrate the blurring of lines between the man and the myth, the narration acts alongside shots which combine with Jesse’s pensive face which cross dissolves into dreamlike landscapes, is utilised not only to dispel these myths but also to cement the blurred periphery of fact and fiction in the national consciousness and imagination of America. It could be considered that
Jesse's myth and the real Jesse were difficult to distinguish due to the fact Jesse fuelled the myth himself.
Although Jesse explains to Bob Ford that the dime novels and newspaper articles which nurture the myth are “all lies,” this is of secondary importance to Bob, who is looking for his hero to duplicate and become what he considers a living legend.
The day of Jesse James’s assassination could be considered to be a day of reckoning between old and new manhood; as Jesse walks into the living room, the camera pans around Bob in a pointofview shot from Jesse’s perspective, indicating that Jesse and Bob will settle their score. Whilst dusting a picture of a horse, Jesse is shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford. The force of the gunshot makes Jesse’s head bounce against the picture, breaking the glass of the frame and the camera shows in full length,
Jesse’s body crumpling to the floor. This body could be of anybody; his mythic body is deprived (albeit temporarily) of any heroism.
14
Fig 2.1: Jesse being shot by Robert Ford.
Bob Ford does not inherit Jesse’s mythic status. Instead Bob is destined to be the “necessarily inadequate embodiment of the hero figuration”27 and is instead is labelled as a coward who has bereaved
America of its collective hero. America establishes itself in the realm of the cultural imaginary, finding articulation through “images, stories and legends that are shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society.”28 America constructed the tortuous interaction of performative acts and the cultural imaginary; myths, images and ideas which imbues the cultural imaginary with a sense of reality and truth.
It should be noted that Carter finds many of the arguments about the Western forced and often
“suggestive of an (unconscious) ideological correlation between producers of popular culture, policy
27 Boon, Kevin Alexander. “Heroes, Metanarratives, and the Paradox of Masculinity in Contemporary Western Culture.” The Journal of Men’s Studies, 13.3. 2005. p304 28 Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries.Durham: Duke University Press. 2004. p 23
15 makers in the United States and historical events.”29 Ever so adroitly, scene after scene, Dominik steers
Jesse and Bob towards their enmeshed destinies. The character of Jesse James in the film is therefore not the simple, twodimensional parody of western hero but an active agent in history, similar to Christian
Metz’s imaginary signifier, where the object on screen is separate from the object it represents in the real and physical world. Awareness of this distinction between real and representation contrasts severely with they way traditional western’s operate. Bob’s attempt at defining his masculinity through his connection with Jesse is not fulfilling because Jesse does not recognise Bob as his heir and also due to the mythic aura surrounding Jesse is not transferable.30 Bob’s idea of Jesse as the hero against whom he compares his masculinity “simultaneously denotes manhood and demotes male identity”31 as the idealisation of Jesse provides a model to which aspire that remains synchronous to deducible failure. The creation of masculinity through imitation is the light exposed as a twofold process. On one hand “heroes are an important inner maker of identity”32 yet on the other they are depicted as “injurious at the level of individualized masculine identity, as the qualities of the idealized hero figure are always and necessarily absent from individual men.”33 With Neale and Mulvey’s notion of the ideal ego being of profound contradictions, aiming to be the model with which the subject aspires but also the ideal with which the subject is never adequate,34 it can be assumed that Jesse James is part of the spectacular gaze which is as unattainable as the product of a mythic discourse.
29 Carter, Matthew. Myth of the Westerner: New Perspectives on Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Print. 2014. p264 30 Bordin, Elisa. Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the Millennium. Verona: Ombre Corte. Print. 2014. p217 31 Boon, Kevin Alexander. “Heroes, Metanarratives, and the Paradox of Masculinity in Contemporary Western Culture.” The Journal of Men’s Studies, 13.3. 2005. p304 32 Porpora, Douglas V. “Personal Heroes, Religion, and Transcendental Metanarratives.” Sociological Forum, 11.2, 1996: p211. 33 Ibid. Boon. p304 34 Neale, Steve. Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema. Screen 24 (6). December 1983.
16 Lee Clarke Mitchell considers the western hero’s “azure gaze...essential to the delineation of masculinity.”35 The relationship between James and Ford, whether fatherson or heroworshiper relation to the outlaw could be contested to be related to general concerns about masculinity; how it has been performatively reproduced and in such a widespread way by means of the western. Wendy Doniger
O’Flaherty claims that the central questions regarding culture revolves around gender roles, purpose in life and death as well as dealing with concerns of culture and its ambitions to define perspectives, morals and identities through stories. Filmic myths and traditional myths also conflate as the stories alter from film to film. Although looking like, identifying with, and substituting Jesse, Bob is forever doomed to be the inadequate embodiment of his (and our) hero. Dominik is rather more interested in questioning the processes which have created the mythic discourse of the West, metanarratively recovering all the stages of possible western performances, dime novels, theatrical performances, and cinema as the medium that narrates the story the viewer is given.
Fig 2.2: Bob Ford watching Jesse bathe.
35 Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print. 1996. P156
17
The Western hero myth is deconstructed into its formulaic representations: masculine figures connote power through symbols such as fog, shadows, and open spaces; while the weaker characters, such as the women and “cowards” are confined to door frames and windows. Thus, the few women in The Assassination of Jesse James are often depicted gazing placidly out of windows, confined by not only men’s presence on screen but by actual space itself. In addition, most of Bob Ford’s inquisitive watch of
Jesse takes place through screens and doors and via this symbolism he is cast as a coward as the title of the film supposes. This heavyhanded symbolic imagery is then immediately read by the audience as the clichéd style of the western. When the audience becomes aware of these devices, the mechanism of film style is exposed and thus the art direction reveals this formula as reenacted myth. After one sequence where Bob curiously meanders after Jesse through town and notes his actions, Bob’s peering through the door is as an act of invasion of Jesse’s private space, much like in the scene where Bob watches Jesse bathe in the bathtub. Lee Clark Mitchell argues that the male body is put on display in westerns so the audience can watch “men becoming men...by being restored to their male bodies.”36 Mitchell goes on to explain this most often occurs in the bathtub. (See fig 2.2) “No other genre has men bathe so often as
Westerns, where they repeatedly strip down to nothing more than an occasional hat, cigar and bubbles.”37
This scene problematises the male to male gaze and implies that the sexual gaze and and the look of identification can overlap in the western. The scene does not rationalise Bob’s watching of Jesse, instead rendering him merely visually ingesting Jesse’s corporeality in preparation for a future substitution. Bob wishes to look and consume Jesse’s persona, wanting to achieve the masculinity on display as a step towards his entrance into the world of men. Jesse watching Bob is a positioned as being a frame within the frame of the film screen itself, and Jesse’s ability to see the hidden action of the scene is like the
36 Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print. 1996. p151 37 Idib. p151
18 audience’s own omnipotent perspective on these characters. Dominik is therefore drawing attention to not only the filming process itself through framing Jesse, but through showing films within frames, he is creating a new element in the narrative and metafictional world.
The fastidious anxiety in post 9/11 masculinity is rooted firmly in the failures of hero ideology which I believe is inextricably linked to recalling the founding masculine myths of America. The narrative at the crux of the reaction in the wake of September 11th was less about the act of terrorism than about the idealised national identity concerning America's past. James Berger suggests “truth” as that which “must be continually imagined”38 in the post 9/11 context of America’s national trauma. The film wallows in a lost and empty world the film tells of nostalgia for a safe, patriarchal culture. As westerns patronise narratives of past cultural crisis's the possibility of “a man with a gun...silhouetted against and empty landscape, [is] the figure capable of engaging us in the midst of anxieties.”39 If Jesse
James is the apotheosis of the American western hero, the embodiment of American masculine values, there is at play then, an active American masculinity. From Bob’s perspective, Jesse is presented not as a man, but as a legend. The shot before the first train robbery cinematographically shows this enchantment as it evokes the memory of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer over a Sea of Fog which validates the romantic facade that has been framing Jesse James in both the imagination of Robert Ford and that of
America.
38 Berger, James. 'There's No Backhand To This,' in ed. Greenberg, Judith. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Print. 2003. p43 39 Cawelti, John G. The SixGun Mystique. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1984. Pg 41
19
Fig 2.3: Jesse James shrouded in fog.
Fig 2.4: Caspar David Friedrich. “Wanderer of a Sea of Fog” 1818. Kunsthalle Hamburg. Germany.
20 The multiple perspectives that are derived in this staging are reflective of the layering of different points of view that create a film narrative. Therefore, Dominik’s film is a reflexive condensation of varied collections of memories and different perspectives, in other words, precisely what is required in the translation of fact on to the screen image and what has fuelled the myth of Jesse James. Deakin’s cinematography seems simultaneously new and antique. An effect added to by the striking, intermittent use of filters producing a radial blur around a clear central image as if looking through a kaleidoscope.
In both the palette and several shot compositions there are shades of impressionism and the time of the film’s setting, new art of photography. There are multiple shots of the film which bear blurred edges, reminiscent of photographs from a daguerreotype and give sequences a dreamlike quality.
Fig 2.5: Shot of inside of a saloon.
This fragmented effect of the cinematography evokes the notion of preserving Jesse the man in the national memory as well as fuelling the myth of a stoic outlaw. The elements of photography work in the part to illustrate the historic past as well as towards the end of the film, Dominik reconstructs the photographing of Jesse's corpse as well as interlacing the actual picture of Jesse's dead body in the film footage. Stylistically, the film exploits its genre’s roots and the imagistic mechanisms upon which westerns traditionally rely.
21
Fig 2.6: Reflection of lens showing Jesse James’ body.
The Assassination rebukes against the harmful consequences of mythic versions of masculinity as male to male gaze, as proposed in and by the western, may have pernicious repercussions for the development of paradigms of masculinity. As a neo western, the film questions the western genre in and of itself, whilst probing how the genre define masculinity. Through revealing perpetuation of white hegemonic masculinity, the film liberates visual and narrative to elucidate that this masculinity is imagined. Thus, the relationship between Robert Ford and Jesse James schematises the quandary of contemporaneous American masculinity.
22 Old Lawman. New evil.
The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men explores the idea that America, once a place of serenity and comfort, is now occupied by evil and violence. The film is a provocative and moving tale which revolves around three men and how they face the violence of modern society. Violence as an ideology is criticised through visual representations, use of dialogue and gratuitous acts throughout the film which illustrates the Coen’s stance on American society. The film is told through intertwined stories of murder, theft and incomprehensible acts of inhumanity taking place in 1980’s America and takes a pessimistic look at masculinity. Whilst it has been interpreted that the film can be read an antiBushCheney allegory where law and patriarchy are ineffective to deal with terror,40 the film’s commentary on the ways in which the Bush government turned final control into an ultimate political value post 9/11 suggests that such a response functions within a theological assumption which is disassembled in the representation of the confrontation between the retiring Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy
Lee Jones) and the hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem)41. The plot of the film follows a working class man, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who finds a suitcase filled with $2 million from a Mexican drug deal which went wrong and, as a result, is pursued by criminals, lawmen and bounty hunters.
In No Country for Old Men existence without essential meaning is explored as are the themes of destructive fate, redemption, good vs evil binary and the film is imbued by an existential ethos of anxiety, dread and the impending possibility of death. The film conjoins Bell and the antagonist Chigurh, through having the two adversary characters often occupying the same distinct spaces, thus relating to the inhabitation of space among the people of the country. The dearth of thematic explicitness, however,
40 Cho, Daniel as cited in Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the BushCheney Era ed. Douglas M. Kellner. John Wiley & Sons. Print. 2011. p 1995 41 De Boever, Arne. “The Politics of Retirement: Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men after September 11.” Image & Narrative. Issue Vol.X, Issue 2 (25.) L'auteur et son imaginaire: l'élaboration de la singularité / The author and his imaginary: the development of particularity. June 2009.
23 allows Bell, Chigurh and Moss to become paradigms for the American character42 as opposed to mere recalcitrant individuals. Chigurh serves as a strong thematic highlight in the film; he represents the evil in the world and the randomness of chance, as well as, paradoxically, the inevitability of fate. Bell and
Chigurh represent a jarring thematic marriage where there is simply no good or evil; instead, there is only fate and chance and whatever lies in between. There is questioning of the "new kind" of American and evil that Sheriff Bell cannot comprehend. I will examine how men in this film represent rapidly changing society and how they represent different components of an archaic patriarchal system; Sheriff Bell as a police officer is the literal law, Llewelyn Moss as a hunter symbolises a law of domination at the expense of others and Chigurh as a hitman represents an excessive code of law and fate.
No Country for Old Men begins, similar to all of the other Coen brothers films, with an establishing shot of the landscape, the wide open expanses of the vast west Texas plain. The first twenty minutes of the film contain little dialogue, apart from the voiceover narration which breaks the silence of the landscape as Tommy Lee Jones, the local sheriff, informs the viewer about times past. Indicative of times that times that lay ahead, Sheriff Bell recalls sending a teenage boy to the electric chair for what was called a “crime of passion” but Bell sees no passion in it. He states the boy told him he would have killed sooner or later and, revolted by this murder, Bell is unable to make sense of his times and is trapped in a nostalgia for times passed. His expressing guilt for sending this boy to his death is symptomatic of how society has become transformed in such a way as to have alienated Sheriff Bell. What is evoked through the fusing of narration and the visual landscape the scene evokes images of the American West and the dangers of the wilderness. The montage of desert imagery and a few establishing shots representing the arrest of the central antagonist Anton Chigurh, requires the viewer to imagine and
42 a character which Stephen McVeigh in The American Western claims is one imbued with the “values of the frontiersman: optimism, proaction, energy and determination.”
24 simultaneously visualise the relation between the visual and aural tracks and functions as a sort of pedagogical entrance into the visual regime of the film.
Alan Noble in his article “Hope Defered: No Country for Old Men” expressed that without
Sheriff Bell’s first person narration in the film, the Coen brothers fail to “give us the dialogue and narrative...necessary to understand the violence we see.”43 However, I contend that although there is a surplus of violence in the film, much of this violence is without logic or reason which is indicative of
American society. Furthermore, Sheriff Bell contextualises through his narration, the violence which occurs in the film as the clash between the old world and the new one replacing it. Society, however, fails to be tangible to Bell, which is at the crux of the film: American values solely exist in old men. “I think once you stop hearing sir and madam, the rest is soon to follow.” The younger generation holds a nihilistic viewpoint; no other characters in the film, beyond Bell, believe in anything. Chigurh adheres to moral nihilism, where moral judgements are entirely individual and arbitrary and he admits no rational justification or criticism.44 Whilst Bell’s narration offers a facile perspective of America, the film manages to link the sheriff’s heightened vulnerability and the terror of Anton Chigurh to disclose the interrelation between government and terror through the voiceover narration.
The voiceover accompanies Chigurh’s arrest and the foundational weaving together of the images is developed later on in the film when Bell visits Llewelyn Moss’s trailer in search of him and the missing suitcase of money. Chigurh visited the trailer only minutes before and Bell sits in exactly the same spot where Chigurh had been sitting and like Chigurh, the sheriff sees his reflection in Moss’s television screen. In No Country for Old Men, the viewer’s apprehension of the filmic world is akin to Sheriff Bell’s discerning of visual and aural clues, and transformation from distant isolated observer to active
43 Noble, Alan, “Hope Defered: No Country For Old Men” in Christ & Pop Culture.13 December 2007.
25 participant. A reverse point of view shot shows us the television screen where the figure of Anton
Chigurh looms abstracted and motionless with light streaming from a window behind his back, his figure is reduced to a projected shadow. He is transfixed by his projected image. A few moments later as Ed
Tom Bell visits the same location also looking for Llewelyn Moss, he replicates Chigurh’s ritual. He settles on the same coach and pours himself a glass of milk from the same bottle out of which Anton
Chigurh was drinking earlier. Sitting on the sofa, he also gets transfixed by his projected image on the television screen in the same affective but unqualified response. The television screen acts to project, certainly in the 80’s when the film was set, images of classical westerns into the domestic sphere. What is conveyed, however, is not a clear John Wayneesque figure but a blurred silhouette of a lawman who is attempting to define his image as a man. Whereas in The Assassination of Jesse James the performance of masculinity at play is active and performative, here Bell’s reflection is static. He appears quiet and indiscernible, unable to configure his masculinity as reflected for him.
Both of these reflective emblematic moments require the viewer’s deciphering: the repetition of actions, composition and editing structure invite a symbolic reading which parallel and link the fate of these two characters. The image we see is further distorted, however, by the concave element of the screen a visual critique. In other words, the image distortion fails to correspond to the current reality (time and space) that he is occupying. Important to this discussion are the ideas that, for Deleuze, reflections represent the originary form of time where everything, including we as human beings, is doubled in every instant. Deleuze's most simple example is of a reflection in film is that of a character looking in a mirror.
The audience is able to look between the reflected image and the character and determine which one is which. The reflection for Deleuze can be a substitute for virtual memory and the character for actual perception. The cyclical nature between actual image and virtual memory happens when the image or
“present situation attains ‘deeper levels of reality.”45
45 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The MovementImage. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Print. 1986.
26
Fig 3.1: Reflection of Sheriff Bell on television screen.
An image, such as the television screen above, presents and represents actual and virtual, present and past, time image or a direct image of time. Bell and Chigurh’s images overlap and although the two men never meet in the film they are instead affiliated in this preternatural moment as haunted and haunting presences of the West, as well as juxtaposed mirror images of each other. However, Bell fails to conform to mythic expectations and Chigurh flouts identity or narrative, becoming instead a horrifying imagining of a world out of control; combined they blend into a perverse synthesised identity which is alive in the West. The opposition between Chigurh and the sheriff reveals an intimacy and similitude between the pair as well as what these two men stand for; government and terror. Tommy Lee Jones’s
27 reflection whilst wearing a cowboy hat mirror that of George Bush’s public appearances post 9/11 in
Stetsons which allayed the fears of the nation, presenting the President as a man of courage and dependability; attributes which, in the classical western, are associated with a solitary cowboy fighting evil. Since 9/11 a previously considered chauvinistic paradigm of protectorate masculinity has returned to the fore of not only films but television also. Bell, as a lawman who retires at the end of film due to his inability to comprehend modern society, is as incompetent at defending his homestead as Bush was.
Bell enjoys hearing about the old times whenever possible as those times were easier to comprehend, although he cannot help but compare himself against them. The voice over concluded its monologue thus:
“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I am afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard… He would have to say, okay, I’ll be part of this world.”
Through talking directly to the viewer, the narrator introduces the moral dilemma of the character and the possibility of introspection and selfknowledge. Nevertheless, the visual aspect of the film indicates that achieving awareness is arbitrated by the deliberate process of partial recognition, a sort of coming into consciousness based on suggestive yet fundamentally cryptic images. Sheriff Bell illustrates what Friedrich Nietzsche identifies as one of the dangers of history and its potentially deadening effect on the present, due to Bell being from a family of lawmen. In relation to judging the past Nietzsche states
“For as we are merely the resultant of previous generations, we are also resultant of their errors, passions and mistakes, indeed of their crimes.”46 It becomes clear that in this context, Nietzsche wished to illustrate that men have an inherent nature which is resultant of previous generations and they cannot distinguish themselves from it even if they comprehend it is flawed. In calling for men to obliterate their
46 Strong, Tracy B., Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Berkeley, University of California Press. Print. 1988. p274
28 pasts and replace it with a new one will provide them with a new nature and without this new form, men will remain embroiled in the dissatisfaction which are a necessary characteristic of their present nature.
No Country for Old Men is a comingofage tale in which the real protagonist, Sheriff Bell, comes to understand his place in the universe. Conceivably, Bell learns what Carl Jung says is “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a candle in the darkness of mere being.”47 Bell believes in a conservative worldview in which family and community deserve to be the driving force between the individual and society and in which good and evil are constantly in conflict with each other, although evil is now flourishing. Chigurh on the other hand, is amoral and believes he is a force of sheer will who can live without any social restrictions. Yet despite Chigurh escaping justice and Bell seeing Chigurh as representative of a new soulless generation, driven by money, I argue the film has, nevertheless has somewhat of a happy ending. When Bell details his dream, it could be allegorised to his conception of selfforgiveness. In sensing that the goals he had set himself were too high; “And then I woke up” illustrates he is now awake after having lived in a dream for his whole life. Bell has realised that the universe is governed by a dark force that includes the Manichean (good vs evil) structure Bell advances as an explanation for what has happened to his society. He believes the genesis of evil is savage individualism which allows greed and violence to prevail. Old narratives of settlement, hegemony and national belonging are endangered when challenged by the inexorable borderlands’ logic of violent drug cartels, illegal immigration and corporations encapsulated in the wraithlike schemes of Chigurh.
It is worthy to note that the film’s title, and the Cormac McCarthy book on which it is based, is drawn from William Butler Yeats’s poem Sailing to Byzantium. The central message of the poem is that in order to be happy in old age, we should abandon the world’s more primal pleasures and turn to the eternal instead. As the film approaches its end, its focus changes from the external to the internal; and the suitcase of money is ultimately rendered inconsequential. The ending could be read as there is no
47 Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Fontana Press; New Ed edition. Print. 2013. p46
29 redemption for any character or any form of transformation for Chigurh and this pessimism is what Joan
Mellen has described as a downward turn of American culture. It is reflective of a dominant culture mood and moreover could be seen as an inversion of the depiction of the north and south of the border.48 The film tells of what is happening to the United States, the world, and every individual is a modification of a dynamic that recurs throughout personal and political history. The ending of the film initiates a sense of loss; not only the loss of money, but the loss of way the sheriff perceives the modern world and his relationship to it. Bell realises through his conversation with Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin) that one cannot act alone, as old mythic cowboys did for as Ellis implies, the world cannot be ordered or stopped. Neither is it about one’s own selfinterested feelings or inner turmoil, for there is always a bigger, collective picture beyond the self. “This country is hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it, yet folks never seem to hold it to account.” The devil here can be analogised to Chigurh, like a ghost haunting from the West’s past, as if the violence alive in the country itself is an uprising of the buried and repressed legacy of conquest endlessly visited on and challenging the present.49 The new West in the film stands as a collapse of the promise of the domestication of the wilderness and the visual clues suggest that the urbanisation of the natural landscape. Bell lacks agency, never seems to be in control and trails behind the events, making the audience wonder how the Sheriff will ever deliver justice.
Violence is integral to westerns and also contemporary society, violence disrupts and threatens the social order which Bell abides by. The polarity between Bell and Chigurh is a conflict of individual will which cannot coexist with Bell in a position of power within society. Bell's inability to change fate and can only make lugubrious comparisons between the intelligible past and the unintelligible present.
Friedrich Nietzsche also attributed tedium to the old age of mankind and claimed it would be relieved by the murderous acts of “a pale criminal.” This pale criminal, similar to Chigurh, transcends “money or
48 Mellon, Joan. “Spiraling Downward: America in Days of Heaven, In the Valley of Elah, and No Country for Old Men.” Film Quarterly 61.3. 2008.: 24–31. Print. 49 Campbell, Neil. “Spook Country: The Pensive West of No Country for Old Men” in Post Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Print. 2013. p343
30 drugs or things like that.” Indeed, the pale criminal is a study of latent evil in humankind, not the most ominous sort of evil, but rather the sort of evil that invests itself without deeper emotional bearings.
Indeed, it could be considered that Chigurh acts as a kismet figure. Neither money nor drugs move him and he appears stoic throughout most of the twelve murders which occur throughout the duration of the film. His repeated and seemingly meaningless acts of violence are as tedious as the end of history itself. It does not seem to matter who Chigurh is; instead the Coens’ use him as a catalyst who represents different destructive things to different people: evil, chaos, psychopathy. His principles, as bounty hunter Carson
Welles (Woody Harrelson) puts it, are incomprehensible and beyond the laws of civilised men. Chigurh represents the Coen’s disconcerting representation of contemporary society. He acts as death, fate and destiny and executes acts of violence without mercy and purpose. Unlike Bell, he stands alone in his set of principles which we are told he has, but they are not concernable. In contrast to Bell’s “legendary past”
50 mentality, Chigurh represents a dystopian outlook on the future that results in a similar level of distance and displacement. The film, however, sets up some of semantic signals of violence visually and the mystery of motivation regarding this violence enhances the characters individualistic nature as people almost impossible to comprehend. Chigurh represents the embodiment of evil; he lives outside societal rules and only he knows the code by which he lives. The bounty hunter, Carson Wells asks Chigurh if he
“has any idea how goddamn crazy you are?” to which Chigurh responds “You mean the nature of this conversation?” “I mean the nature of you.”
The brutality of violence in the film begins with Chigurh’s choking of the deputy at the police station after he has been arrested. He manages to take his handcuffed hands up around his back, over his front and then step his feet through them, bringing his hands round to his front before murdering the
50 Cawelti, John. G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture, University of Chicago Press. 1977 Print. p259
31 deputy. This act is a foreshadowing of the agility, dexterity and sheer determination that Chigurh has to kill.
Fig3.2: Chigurh strangling a deputy.
The desperation and the flapping of the deputy whilst Chigurh’s face is strangely motionless and verging on stoic depicts the desperation for life in the face of death. Chigurh’s second kill is of a man who he tells to hold still whilst he shoots a rod through his forehead. Chighur’s weapon of choice is also telling in that it “explains a viewpoint on society”51 as the pressurised oxygen tank is a pneumatic stun gun with a captive bolt that is ordinarily used for killing cattle out of their misery when they are injured. The sound of the valve of the machine opening and the release of the compressed gas through the rubber tube connected to the tank are synonymous with Chigurh’s character throughout the film. Often these noises appear offscreen before Chigurh appears into shot and is often preemptive of an act of violence about to occur.
51 Doom, Ryan P. The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence. California:ABC Clio. Print. 2009. P153
32
Fig 3.3: Chigurh’s weapon of choice.
Chigurh asks his victim to “hold still please, sir” as he slowly and politely places the hose of his machine to the man’s forehead before firing. Although Bell has pre warned the audience about how, when the diminished formalities of sir and madam are gone the rest is to follow, Chigurh is polite to his victims before killing them. Contrary to Bell’s opinion, the worst is much more nefarious than polite formalities.
33 Fig 3.4: “Hold still please, sir.”
Anton Chigurh does not hold himself culpable for the deaths, instead the coin toss drives his motivation to kill. When a gas station proprietor asks what it is he can win, or lose in the coin flip,
Chigurh tells him that “you have been putting it up your whole life, you just didn’t know it.” The theme of fate and luck are presented through the film offered firstly to a filling station attendant (who calls correctly and lives) and secondly to Moss’s wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) who refuses to call and is killed. Many philosophers believe key to freedom, free will, is our ability to do things for a reason, rather than some confusing ability to do otherwise. René Descartes, for example, identifies the faculty of will with freedom of choice; “the ability to do or not do something.”52 Carla Jean chose to die rather than play by Chigurh’s rules, demonstrating her element of free will in stark contrast to Chigurh’s. “The coin don’t
52 Della Rocca, M. “Judgment and Will.” In S. Gaukroger, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Descartes’ Meditations, Oxford: Blackwell. Print. 2006 p146
34 have no say; it’s just you” Carla Jean tells Anton. As he bases decisions about whom to kill or spare on whatever has been set in motion by past acts that cannot be undone, determined by a flip of a coin, this allows Chigurh to claim he is instrumental meant to fulfil the will of metaphysical forces that are beyond his control. He therefore embodies the fragmentation of the order that is held in place by society's institutions; law enforcement. In an interview in the New York Times, Joel Coen says of Chigurh “He’s like the man who fell to earth...He’s the thing that doesn’t grow out of the landscape.”53 Although Chigurh sustains injuries like a mortal man and bleeds and sustains broken bones, he is somewhat of a robotic figure who emanates a certain corporeal invulnerability. Other characters in the film refer to him as a
“ghost,” “psychopathic killer” and a “homicidal lunatic.”
Fig 3.5: Chigurh washes the blood from his hands.
Sonya Topolnisky writes that Chigurh “defies classification, nationally or ethnically, speaking in an unplaceable accent and walking with a steady, looming gait.”54 Anton Chigurh’s haircut adds an
53 Hirschberg, Lynn. “Coen Brothers Country” from The New York Times Magazine. November 11th 2007
35 vaguely asexual aspect to his appearance and denotes a man without vanity. The haircut was, the Coens have said, modeled on a photograph of a man at a bordertown whorehouse.55 Although perhaps he is in many ways exoticised, Chigurh adheres to a specific ethics and faith that subversively affiliate him with the masculine which is confirmed by his relationship with violence. His accent, clothing and haircut, cattle gun set Anton Chigurh apart from his surroundings. The film’s setting in Texas, along the Southern frontier is one of the most emotionally charged areas in the United States. The border setting of the film brings to mind preoccupations with immigration, mobility, and various types of traffic into the country.
Perhaps this is why Chigurh is so difficult to place, nationally or ethnically as he is the amalgamation of all these concerns.
The attacks which Chigurh carry out can be analogised to the September 11th attacks as both are centred around destruction and incomprehensibly. The attacks, similar to Chigurh’s mockery of his victims, invalidate moral agency and consider that violence does not only belong to the individual but to the whole society and nation. Chigurh can be seen as a man of the present or the future, of unspecified race, language and name, who impinges into the orderly, resolved world of Bell’s West, like a ghost.
Time is conspicuous in the film, in slow scenes that dwell on time passing, such as Chigurh’s conversations with the gas station owner and the trailer park attendant. In addition to this, the audience are predominantly exposed to Chigurh from above; we look down on Chigurh killing the deputy, washing his hands in a basin and cleaning his leg wound in a bathtub. The Coens distance themselves from events that no one has a hope of mediating. The high angles create an enduring sense that the film itself is scared of
Chigurh. In Roger Ebert’s review of the film, he claims it is “essentially a character study, an examination of how it’s people meet and deal with a man so bad, cruel, and unfeeling that there is simply no comprehending him.”56 Due to the violence in the film, emanating from Chigurh, other characters do not
55 Coen, J (2007) Interviewed by Katey Rich. Cinema Blend “NYFF: No Country for Old Men.” 8th October.
36 know how to react and deal with him. Extreme and gratuitous violence have been used eloquently by the
Coen’s to express through the subtext of the film as a criticism of the violence in contemporary America.
Camilla Fojas states that “As a figure of terrorism, Chigurh is everywhere and nowhere at once...He is the nightmarish symptom of a renegade capitalism without limits, boundaries or borders.
[The comment regarding Chigurh’s principles transcending money or drugs] resonates with the constant iteration of US ideology as the pursuit not of economic gain (or oil) but of “democracy” as well as the imperious power of US policies to drive the state directives of other nations.”57 Chigurh could be considered to be capitalist risk culture incarnate. For it can be no coincidence that a man who kills anyone who impedes his journey to find the missing suitcase full of money, decides innocent people’s fates with the flip of a quarter and uses a dime to unscrew the vent covers in motel where Moss had hidden the case of cash. Llewelyn Moss crossed from north (Texas) to south (Mexico) easily, passing himself off as a drunk. He buys a coat for $500 from some teenagers who give him the coat without any concern for
Moss’s injuries and bloodstained clothing. Perhaps this is an apocalyptic sign of the supercilious economic relations north of the border. The young boy at the end of the film who gives Chigurh his shirt, however, ostensibly would have given him it for free. Money in the film, begets action or silence; in other scenes peripheral characters are seen to be coerced into doing acts of conceivable kindness for amounts of money.
57 Fojas, Camilla. “Hollywood Border Cinema: Westerns with a Vengeance” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 39:2, 93101. 2011
37
Fig 3.6: Boy giving his shirt to an injured Chigurh.
As Chigurh walks away, in broad daylight at the end of the film, there is a realisation that with
Sheriff Bell’s retirement the attempt to control terror ends up producing more terror. The conflict between Chigurh and Bell raises the question, post 9/11, of how government is going to respond to undermining terror and to the sense of intensified vulnerability that it produces. Judith Butler supposes that “final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value”58 when it comes to reacting to terror as control is inexorably thrown into disarray by the processes that traverse it, and of which it is a part. The sense that final control and justice would have been attained, as No Country for Old Men makes us realise, is a theological supposition that hazards to produce precisely the opposite of what it attempts to bring about.
The main characters I have discussed, Ed Tom Bell and Anton Chigurh represent different systems, albeit systems which require a code essential to the composition of patriarchal control. Each man seems lost in a rapidly changing America, and this new social landscape which has changed significantly in the country as a result of the equal rights movement; a movement which uncovered that many of the masculine,
58 Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Print. 2004. pxiii
38 patriarchal systems as unnecessary and antiquated. Masculinity is shown through the vanquishing of the protagonists as each male is deficient at his attempt of masculinity. Bell not only fails to arrest Chigurh but also fails to be a man and to live up to the masculine expectations of being a sheriff and a productive member of society. The film’s emphasis on masculine action is devoted to both the enforcement and defiance of law. In dealing with the cross border setting, homing in on masculinity and placing it within a secure and recognisable selfconcept, the Coen’s illustrate that masculinity thus is likely to be a dissipating prospect. The cowboy mentality, as embodied by Sheriff Bell, is challenged through his pensive cognisance and “symbolize[s] the return of the repressed...a return of what, at any given movement, has become unthinkable in order for a new identity to become thinkable.”59
59 De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History, New York: Columbia University Press. Print. 1988. p4
39 Family, oil, religion. Blood
There Will Be Blood encourages whilst simultaneously challenges, the prevalent American belief that with diligence, progressive men can triumph in an individualistic, capitalist system while maintaining the meritoriousness of integrity, family, religion and community. I contend that in There Will Be Blood capitalism, industrious work ethic and values of family60 are intrinsic to the central plot which also focuses on a tangle of male relationships, predominantly intersecting sets of fathers, sons and pairs of brothers. Based loosely on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation focuses upon large themes about America; blood, oil and religion. The film tells the story of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day
Lewis), a Machiavellian self proclaimed “oil man” seeking his fortune during the Southern Californian oil boom at the commencement of the twentieth century. Anderson’s film continues Sinclair’s critique of capitalist enterprise. Characters are depicted as being as corrupt as the oil trade itself and exploitation at the level of family and religion is infiltrated with greed and an individualistic determination to succeed, whatever the cost. Plainview flourishes into a western antihero, symbolic of recent American identity, eventually seeking to avoid self reflection and finally achieving masculine agency through becoming a post industrial giant. Fatherhood also impacts the self made oil man, yet Daniel’s son is adopted, which adds elements of surrogacy to the notion of what it means to be a patriarch. Most scenes in the film are comprised of direct confrontations, either between groups of people or between people and the land itself; fitting for a film driven by competition and one in which Plainview’s immense ego in conflict with the world.
Both Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) and Daniel abuse their families and communities for profit. Daniel's investment into his father and son bond and myth is key to his identity as well as his business which is a double betrayal by his son H.W. when he states he is starting up his rival oil business in Mexico. This
60 Wood, Robin, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur: "Shadow of a Doubt" in Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Columbia University Press: New York. Print. 1989 p669
40 conflict between the two ruptures the impossibility of repairing the fatherson dynamic in a capitalist regime and simultaneously critiques the inability of masculine identity to assert itself in post 9/11 society.
This society is driven by consumerism and capitalism where money is valued higher than family. Daniel has built a family, much like he has built himself a fortune. Yet this control of the family breaks down, reaching a nadir when H.W. marries Eli Sunday’s sister Mary. A sense of restoration and renewal does not happen in There Will Be Blood, a film in which the main protagonist rejects family, community and humanity in his perseverance of discovering oil. Indeed, individualism in the film is at odds with family ties; blood. The culminating scene between Plainview who represents capitalism and Eli Sunday as the preacher symbolising religion, is ineluctable as they are competitors. Eli is rendered as concurrently being self made man whose quest for wealth and power, mirroring Plainview, eclipses the sincerity of his faith. Plainview, the unbeliever, never sees Eli as anything other than and rival businessman: “That was one goddamn helluva show” he tells Sunday after one of his sermons.
We first see Plainview emerging from the depths of the earth and he appears to represent evolution; a man who has survived through lower forms of live and who has survived through his adaptation, overcoming adversity. Nick James’s essay “Black Gold” also examines the scene in which the viewer is first introduced to Daniel Plainview. He claims that as the audience see Plainview buried in a hole, searching for silver who then pulls himself up from the shaft, we could see this as Plainview being
“from hell, a blackened demon from the pit.”61 In this close reading, James analyses the sparks flying from Plainview’s axe and the long, gruelling escape from the mine. The scene is also symbolic of a womb from which he emerges, self birthed, thus reiterating Plainview as a selfmade man. The dialogue free also beginning feels like an emblematic birthing which is a brutal contest between men’s bodies and the earth.
The first words spoken in the film are a semiinaudible gasp of “there she is” spoken by Plainview after he finds silver in a well, the discovery of which instigates his reentry into society, as he drags himself
61James, Nick. “Black Gold” Sight and Sound, 18.2, Feb 2008. Print. p32
41 back into town with a broken leg, to substantiate his claim. The film associates Plainview with the earth.
He is depicted as a primitive character and there is a dramatisation of fossil fuel futurity as an ideology; natural resources are explicitly portrayed as the material upon which a set of norms and visions of the future are constructed. Trains feature in multiple scenes of the film and are a symbol of industry in westerns, often referring to the imminent presence of industrial modernity which is another process of momentum in the nation building legend which turns away from living off the land. Unlike the depiction of nature in The Revenant as a spectacle of the American west, the viewer is presented with a dystopian and arid landscape upon which the oil derricks provide a welcome relief.
Ultimately, Plainview uses the oil rich land of California in order to prosper, using phallic oil derriks which rape the earth of its bounty. In masculinity and the representative, guns accentuate the genital region of the male body62 yet in this film, the machinery which penetrates the earth, can be considered especially phallic.
Fig 4.1: Oil on the lens.
When oil pours out of the rig, like a coaxing blackliquid orgasm over the 20th century California earth, it does to remind us of the surrogacy of Plainview’s fatherhood. In addition to this, the stark lack of
62 McGillis, Roderick. He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Print. 2009. p73
42 females in the film illustrates that Plainview’s world revolves around males; his son, miners, other oil businessmen illustrates his suffocation by the patriarchal hierarchy of a male society and the infernal birth of an industry.
In a deleted scene from the film, Daniel tells his brother “He’s [H.W.] not even my son...my cock doesn’t work, how’m I gonna make a kid.” Kathleen Parker’s Save the Males, typifies essential rhetoric identifying the repudiation of traditional masculinity as framing to American ideologies and national security. She bemoans that the “importance of fatherhood has been diminished, along with other traditionally male roles of the father, protector and provider which are increasingly viewed as regressive manifestations of an outmoded patriarchy.”63 Robin Wood argues that the Hollywood configured the
“ideal male” as a “virile adventurer”64 the latter of which is contravened by the script. Hannah Hamad draws a link between fatherhood as a form of masculine survival and cultural preoccupations and anxieties of a post 9/11 society.65 Perhaps the use of phallic imagery depicts, is as Mary Walter’s suggests, an “abstract paternal power” and as such “remains the basis of present day religious and political attitudes.”66 In Anne Gjelsvik’s “Black Blood”, she claims the myriad of blood conveyed in the title; the blood of family, immolation and destruction all combine in Anderson’s metaphorical depiction of blood and oil being indistinguishable.67 Both Eli and Daniel abuse their families and communities throughout the duration of the film for profit. Daniel's investment into his father and son bond and myth is key to his identity as well as his business which is a double betrayal by H.W. when he states he is starting up his rival oil business in Mexico. This conflict between the two ruptures the impossibility of repairing the fatherson dynamic in a capitalist regime and simultaneously critiques the inability of masculine
63 Parker, Kathleen. Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care. London: Random House Publishing group. 2010. Print. p ix 64 Wood, Robin. “Ideology, Genre, Auteur” in The Film Genre Reader III ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2003. Print. p62 65 Hamad, Hannah. Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood. London: Routledge Press. 2013. p93 66 Walters, Margaret. The Nude Male: A New Perspective. London: Paddington Press, Ltd. 1978. Print. p8 67 Gjelsvik, Anne. “‘Black Blood’ : There Will Be Blood” in R Burgoyne (ed.), The epic film in world culture. Routledge, New York. Print. 2011 pp. 296312
43 identity to assert itself in post 9/11 society. This society is driven by consumerism and capitalism where money is valued higher than family. Daniel has built a family, much like he has built himself a fortune.
There is a shift from silence to speech which obscures the cut between surrogacy and reality, then later shift back to silence for H.W., veils through unmitigated visual pleasure, the turn back to surrogacy that is made from father to son. The twin developments of deafness in H.W. and millions in wealth for the father, deconstructs the authority of Daniel as he prefers the expansion of his own material wealth to any concernment for his son. Early in the film, H.W. is deafened permanently when he sustains a blow to the head; his deafness can also be a figure for the political exemplar for the film. The procedure of comprehending oil’s claims on life in the 21st century requires more than presenting the oil industry as corruptible and exploitative. The accident which renders H.W. deaf therefore, acts as a rupture in
American ideology. H.W. is lying on a platform above the drill and as it shakes and explodes with oil, the boy is thrown backwards and Daniel rushes to help his son, they are both covered in thick black oil. In a long tracking shot, we follow Daniel as he weaves in and out of the miners who are running towards the now burning oil. H.W. repeats “I can’t hear my voice” yet his father leaves him on the floor as he goes to attend to the burning rig. Daniel abandons his own child to admire his own riches. As a result, H.W. is immersed in the prelinguistic wilderness which first immersed the viewer for the first fourteen minutes of the film.
Disability in film often works to provoke a heightened sense of sensory knowledge. However, although the use of music in the film is didactic, the film’s visuals work as a textural surface; from the oil blotched human skin68 to the abrasive weave of the pulley ropes and through the film’s muted colour palette which is framed by the burning oil and fire. The style of the film is defined by chiaroscuro shots mostly framed at eye level which is, contrastingly to the protagonists characters, supposed to indicate truth and honesty. The film utilises sensory information through its aesthetic and there could be a parallel
68 Murphet, Julian. “P.T. Anderson’s Dilemma: the Limits of Surrogate Paternity” Sydney Studies in English 34. 2008. p 75
44 therefore, between D.W.’s deafness and the visual texturality of the film. Ironically, the film utilises film techniques of the 1930s and 1940s to achieve a cinematographic style particularly steeped in petroleum.69
“If I say I am an oil man, then you will agree. I am a family man. I run a family business. This is my son and my partner, H.W.” This is the first speech the audience hears clearly, some years after the opening scenes of near silence, depicting Plainview with a remarkably more polished and confident demeanour, addressing an audience. This speech, every euphonious note and rolling sentence of it, along with the correlative speech to the residents of Little Boston later on, is designed to demonstrate the beginnings of the self made man. The camera fades to Plainview sitting with his son H.W. by his side, there is a stark difference between a man digging by himself to a man who has created his own image. As a rugged individualist, Daniel Plainview is a driving tool in the face of the force of nature and is depicted as being a master of his own identity and his own destiny. Plainview presents what Ayn Rand would call the heroic individualist and Nietzsche would call the overman.70 Rand’s ideal capitalist is depicted when
Daniel is shown with his small team of miners who have built a seemingly modern oil drill to extract oil from the earth. It is under the aegis of Daniel’s mind and his intelligence, not robustness through which he has created his destiny and fortune.
69 LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford University Press; USA. Print. 2014. p101
70 Stephen Newman compares the Randian hero to Nietzsche's concept of the übermensch claiming that “the Randian hero is really Nietzsche’s superman in the guise of the entrepreneur.” Newman, Stephen. Liberalism at Wits' End. Ithaca: Cornell University. Print.1984 p26
45
Fig 4.2: Daniel Plainview and his son, H.W.
In a scene where Daniel is contemplating his past, he pulls out a photograph of himself as a child.
He is alone in the portrait; removed entirely from his family members and the audience is presented with a man without a past and without context. Others who have shaped him are obliterated. Roland Barthes states a photograph is always referring to something, the look part of engaging and therefore the tangible object becomes invisible. Hence when looking at a photograph, what matters is what it refers to.71 The photograph also depicts a revealing and social space; one which is barren without any others to surround the young Plainview. This instance illustrates Plainview’s self determination, seclusion and egomania which have allowed him to become who he is. This scene also reiterates the popular American metanarrative of self reliance and again, individualism, which is intrinsically linked to capitalism.
Plainview represents the quintessential western role by involving himself so completely with the oilabundant landscape and therefore, indulging his narcissism. In Plainview’s world, Manifest Destiny becomes an individualistic enterprise to isolate himself and as such is perhaps, a supplement of American
Exceptionalism as the method by which he maintains his control, autonomy and wealth is oil. In an essay
71 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida, trans Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Print. 1981. p113
46 on the limitations of representing oil in American culture, Peter Hitchcock criticises There Will Be Blood for casting oil as a form of individual pathology rather than a part of political or economic history.72
However, due to the conflict between Plainview and Sunday, I see the film as an allegorical encounter between the pathology of American capitalism and religion both of past and present.
Fig 4.3: Baptism by oil.
With a strong allusion to Ash Wednesday, baby H.W. is marked on the forehead with crude oil, a sacred oil used in baptisms which was often mixed with ash to keep it in place. At the start of Lent in the
Christian calendar, the mark evokes sin and mortality and the film is certainly replete with both. The mark of oil is echoed immediately with a shot of the makeshift pond used to collect the plentiful oil and this oil sits on the surface filling the pond to the brim, signifying what is to come. Further baptisms occur in the film: Plainview is baptised in mud by Plainview, Plainview is later baptised by Eli in the Church of the
Third Revelation and at the end of the film, Eli lies, baptised in his own blood, by Plainview. The first baptism occurs when Eli, already irascibile, is incensed when Plainview ignores Eli’s wish to baptise the first oil well and decides to confront Daniel who still owes him for the land. Plainview beats Eli and presses his face into a pool of oil. However, at the ceremony, Eli humiliates Plainview in front of the
72 Hitchcock, Peter. “Oil in an American Imaginary,” New Formations 69. Summer 2010. p81
47 congregation. Plainview is made to drop to his knees and confess he is a sinner and is told to beg for the blood of Christ. Daniel’s baptism into the Church of the Third Revelation and repeated shouts of “I’ve abandoned my child” cracks the perfect family image Daniel has conveyed to the community. Yet this revenge is bittersweet as Plainview has realised his dream and knows his pipeline will be a reality. The camerawork throughout the baptism of Daniel Plainview generates empathy for Daniel. It is the only time in the film we see him in a position of weakness, in a position of submission. The low angles throughout highlight this, and the close up shots let us see his true emotions. This makes Daniel seem human and relatable. Perhaps Plainview recognise his own greed in Sunday and is conceivably why the two have such a complex relationship. During the baptism, Plainview shouts “I want the blood” yet it unclear if he wants Christ’s blood for salvation or Sunday’s blood for this humiliation.
Continuing with the religious symbolism, the title for the film itself is taken from Exodus, the second book of the Bible, which tells of a corrupt Egypt ruled by the Pharaohs who are exploiting the
Jews. The exact passage reads:
“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Say to Aaron, “Take your staff and stretch your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, over their streams and over their pools, and over all their reservoirs of water, that they may become blood; and there will be blood throughout all the land of Egypt...”73
The film similarly sees twentieth century America as similarly amoral and with the average
American subject to the same malevolence and abuse of power as the Jews. The neoconservative political ideology of George Bush paired with fundamentalist religion has culminated in an America that embezzles and manipulates its own people. There Will Be Blood has a singular and cogent message; that a capitalism and religion hybrid in the past and present are venal and corrupting. This is a variation on Max
Weber’s theory that religion, especially Christianity, particularly important for the rise of capitalism.74
Weber’s theory can be reformulated as the general claim that heterogeneous forms of religion are useful
73 Exodus 7:19 74 Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans Stephen Kalberg. California: Roxbury Publishing Company. Print. 2002.
48 for or on the contrary harmful to, the prospects of the democratic way of life. There Will Be Blood renders both capitalism and religion at their worst into artificial ideologies for greed money and power.
Capitalism's interchangeable relationship with Christianity is embodied in the relationship between Daniel
Plainview and Eli Sunday. Sunday is a charismatic evangelical minister who claims to be a healer and a vessel for God whose church grows in size alongside the oil fields of his community. Through depicting
Eli as a man willing to renounce his faith in order to attain wealth, the sanctity of the church is undermined.
The twinning and confrontation of Sunday and Plainview throughout the film has led John
Cameron Mitchell to claim There Will Be Blood unearths “...the actual moment [when] the unholy modern Republican coalition was born.”75 The western as a unique and definitive narrative of early
American film is intrinsically linked to the transition of cinema as a pure spectacle into a politically hued medium. Anderson links oil in the early twentieth century to the politics and the Americanness that links it to economic power. When Eli Sunday tells Daniel he wants money for Bandy’s land, Plainview informs the preacher he has already had it: “I drink the blood of lamb from Bandy’s land.” This quip is similar to Senator Albert E. Fall’s congressional testimony of “I drink your milkshake” after he was convicted of accepting bribes for oil drilling rights to public land in California and Wyoming. The modern
American civilisation is based upon oil and the film reflects contemporary disenchantment with capitalism and a system that has become more self serving and avaricious than ever. The impetuous pursuit of money and oil is disguised as a community growth initiative which Anderson utilises to critique the Bush administration's venture into Iraq.
In Daniel Worden’s article “FossilFuel Futurity: Oil in Giant” he supposes Plainview’s son,
H.W.’s moniker comes from the Bush presidencies (George Bush’s father; George H.W Bush). The
75 Ponsoldt, James. “Giant Ambition: An Interview with Paul Thomas Anderson.” Filmmakermagazine.com. Web. 31 Mar 2011. Accessed 3 April 2016 https://filmmakermagazine.com/archives/issues/winter2008/blood.php#.Vx5ClpN96jQ
49 article contests George W. Bush’s widely reported personal grounds for invading Iraq to overthrow
Saddam Hussein: “After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”76 Serving US oil interests simultaneously with George Bush’s sense of familial responsibility, the Iraq war becomes an another ineluctable violent effect of “fossil fuel futurity’s binding of the oil industry to family relations, a connection that is severed as Daniel Plainview and H.W. part ways.”77 Worden connects the film to the
Iraq War in which the political message of the film becomes transparent; “oil promises to secure the future, yet the pursuit of oil replaces family, society and reason.”78
Daniel Plainview tells the community of Little Boston that he encourages his workers to bring their families to dig and that if those workers find oil, their community will prosper. The deceitfulness in this promise doubles as the promise of capitalism and the mechanism of the growth is oil. The speech
Daniel gives to the townsfolk can be seen to reflect The American Dream, where men gain prosperity through hard work; “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.”79 In pitching his company to the people of Little Boston he tells them:
“Now, this work that we do is very much a family enterprise; I work side by side with my wonderful son, H.W….and I encourage my men to bring their families, as well. Of course, it makes for an ever so much more rewarding life for them. Family means children; children means education; so, wherever we set up camp, education is a necessity, and we're just so happy to take care of that... These children are the future that we strive for and so they should have the very best of things....New roads, agriculture, employment, education these are just a few of the things we can offer you, and I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that if we do find oil here...this community of yours will not only survive, it will flourish.”
76 King, John. “Bush calls Saddam ‘the guy who tried to kill my dad,’” CNN.com Friday September 27, 2002. available at http://edition.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/27/bush.war.talk/ accessed March 10th 2016 77 Worden, Daniel. “FossilFuel Futurity: Oil in Giant” in Journal of American Studies. Volume 46. May 2012, pp 441460 78 Ibid. 79 Adams, Truslow James. The Epic of America. New York: Blue Ribbon Books. 1931. Print. p404
50 Fig 4.4: Daniel watching the rig burn.
Daniel’s shout of “I’m finished” as the last words of the film brings to mind Nietzsche’s exploration of the role insanity play in revealing the deepest possible truths about humanity: “In outbursts of passion and in the fantasising of dreams and insanity, a man rediscovers his own and mankind’s prehistory...while his civilised condition evolves out of a forgetting of these primal experiences.”80 It is almost as though through Plainview’s assimilation in the domestic sphere, the showdown between God and oil can finally be settled. Although his integration into the home could be considered particularly feminine, Plainview’s battering of Sunday with a wooden bat (bowling pin) harks back to the primitive beginning of the film, where he roamed the landscape in search of silver. This final scene is one of the very few interior shots in the film. Daniel has been immersed in the land throughout, in a mine, hunting quail, viewing perspective land and briefly in the church where Eli preached. However, in the process of
80 Nietzsche, Friedrich and Clark, Maudemarie. Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Cambridge University Press. Print. 1997. p 314
51 claiming the final frontier, he owns everything and has nothing left to conquer. In being situated in ornate, ostentatious surroundings, he is now enclosed.
The capitalist forces Plainview symbolises and the world he creates, however, endures.
Individually he is ruined, but as a representative of the oil age, not quite. The ending of the film shows the shocking, violent assertion of capitalist domination over religion. Sunday comes begging to the misanthropic Plainview for firstly money, and then his life. Capitalism and religion can coexist but capitalism will always prevail. In murdering Eli, it seems like Daniel’s festering hatred of people he has been building up for years has culminated in one dramatic outburst. He has told Henry “I’ve built up my hatreds over the years, little by little” and uses similar rhetoric when H.W. visits him; “I should have known under all this, these past few years, you have been building your hate for me piece by piece. I don’t even know who you are because you have none of me in you.” Daniel not only anticipates the final loss of control over the symbolic production of blood, but also revels in it. Family consists of people who are financially dependant on Daniel which inevitably destroys the manufactured blood relation; a destruction that serves as a masochistic reinforcement of Daniel’s hypercompetitive worldview.
There Will Be Blood roots greed and violence in an untrammelled capitalist and patriarchal society, fortified by the pillars of religion and family. Anderson’s film attempts to get to the roots of
America’s post 9/11 malaise and illustrates its problems embedded in its core institutions and values, before providing a critical commentary on the contemporary moment. The film can also be seen as a vicious quest for money and wealth, resulting in blood. The film repeatedly portrays and resolves the struggle between oil and religion. Oil, the sacred material, emerges supreme. Capitalism appropriates religion’s attributes to bless and curse, judge and redeem and finally condemn.81
81 Brent RodriguezPlate, S. “A Nation Birthed in Blood: Violent Cosmogonies and American Film” in From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America. Eds John D. Carlson. University of California Press. Print. 2012.
52 Bearman
The Revenant tells of frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) on a fur trapping expedition in the 1820s who, after being mauled by a bear and being left for dead by his team, manages to track them down with the hope of exacting revenge. Images of the wilderness in Iñárritu's film illustrates the western film genre’s conquest of the wilderness and the subjection of nature, in the name of civilisation and the territorial rights of the native inhabitants of the frontier. The stereotypical image of the Indians from early westerns was one of savage beasts who attacked unprovoked. The white civilised world in classic westerns has depicted as being superior to that of the wilderness which was associated with American
Indians. There is an inversion of this in The Revenant. The opening scene depicts the unpredictability of American Indians, yet ultimately, despite their lack of guns and instead relying on rudimentary bows and arrows, they are depicted as resourceful, agile and dexterous and ultimately living purely off the land.
Whereas the land is depicted in There Will Be Blood as being arid, the juxtaposition of the magnificence of nature in The Revenant is spectacular. I will analyse the ongoing allure of American Indians and discover if “going native” aids with recovering a safer masculinity in relationship to nature. The film is also violent; abundant with the killing of humans and animals alike. Yet Iñárritu does not spectacularize or even moralise this violence as it is subjugated by the sheer transcendency of nature.
In American discourse, wilderness stands for what nature is before it was despoiled by humans.
Writers such as Jack London, for example, make one believe in the power of nature. The author’s message is that wilderness must triumph: either join it and live by its ways, or succumb. Exposure to
America and its capricious elements place cardinal demands on the individual, which become significant and ennobling errand for a nascent democracy that nurtured the rights and related resourcefulness of each individual.82 Hugh Glass is the only noticeable heroic individual in all four of the film analysed and he is
82 Brereton, Pat. Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2005. Print. p131
53 figured as the one who has the most intimate relationship with nature. I will argue this neo western has managed to embody travel through the landscape in an endeavour to inaugurate a new American template for civilisation and masculinity. The film stretches for sublimity in addressing spiritual issues such as resurrection and rebirth and is set in the infancy of America’s 19th century westward expansion. There are fusions of ideological ideas such as civilisation vs nature and individual strength against great odds. I will analyse the topography and the role it plays in understanding The Revenant and examine if the terrain, which is often hostile, bucolic and serene, aids in understanding man’s relationship to American West.
It could be contended that Hugh Glass’s aversion to abide by societal norms meant he was compelled to journey back into the wilderness where he could be an encumbered agent within nature. For
Deborah Carmichael there is a relationship between rivers and mountains which as nature’s basic elements work to define culture. “The importance of the landscape itself, the idyllic or treacherous environment negotiated in these films, often receives supportingrole status, yet without the land,
American national mythmaking would not exist.”83 Carmichael, examines the way in which landscape is often seen as secondary to the narrative, however, I would like to contend that in The Revenant, the landscape is paramount to the narrative. The film sets up a metanarrative which enables viewers to shape
American cultural history. I believe an analysis of the American landscape in the film reveals an intricately connected relationship between race, national identity and social order. The landscape is not merely a backdrop for digectic action but a representation for foregrounding nature as a navigation for masculinity and national identity.
There is a metaphoric gendering of landscape found in American colonialist discourse is perhaps most carefully considered by Annette Kolodny in The Lay of the Land. Kolodny argues that
83 Carmichael, Deborah A. The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 2006. Print. p252
54 “America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy [is that of] a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land as essentially feminine—that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification.”84
By scripting the land as female, Kolodny argues that the American colonists were able to see the land as either nurturing and or ready to be dominated. Kolodny theorised that by gendering the land, by seeing it as virginal, the discourse of American colonisation and imperialism was in a position to minimise the threat of the unestablished, of the unmapped wilderness, and instead formulate it as something that could be taken advantage of. Women have been perceived as allied to the cyclical and repetitive realm of nature, whereas masculine identity has been viewed as a storied achievements which outvie biology. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir provides an insight into the association between men’s transcendence and the domain of nature. She argues that men’s transcendence has been historically achieved by the subordination of both women and the natural world. “For it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal: that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not in the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.”85
Richard Hofstadter deliniates the frontier process a “perpetual rebirth,”86 but points out that the connotations of violence were brought to bear on the idea of the frontier not by Turner but by cultural critics like Lewis Mumford. There is a scene within The Revenant where Hugh Glass climbs out of a horse carcass could be equally seen as a resurrection as well as a rebirth. (Here I think it is worth noting the word nature derives from the Latin ‘natura’ meaning birth.) If we consider the horse as a womb, we can see it as a space where life can germinate and Glass can come into existence, again seeking revenge for his son’s death. The etymology of the title of the film is, I believe, significant. Revenant means a
84 Kolodny, Annette. “Unearthing Herstory: An Introduction.” In The Lay of the Land. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Print. 1975 p4 85 De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf. Print.1953. p72 86 Hofstadter, Richard, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier. New York: Basic, 1968. Print. p4
55 person who has returned, supposedly from the dead. Glass symbolically resurrects at least three times in this film; he is buried alive, baptised and emerges from the womb (horse carcass.)
The scars on Glass’s back could be compared to Christ’s whipping. A group of fur trappers carry
Glass on a stretcher, symbolic of the cross of Christ, and after being buried, he finds the strength to climb out of the grave which has been dug by Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) for him. Fitzgerald, could be considered to be a Judas character; he betrays Glass by killing his son which spurs the revenge narrative for the remainder of the film. Glass claims “I ain’t afraid to die. I done it already” and in doing so is metaphorically coming back to life to avenge his son’s death. There is a Christ like figure in Glass’s son. In a dream sequence, his son is displayed standing in front of a fresco of Christ on a torn down Spanish mission wall. Perhaps this is symbolic of God’s resurrection in contemporary culture; The Revenant’s 19th century frontier is a fitting proxy for the tempestuous climate of the 21st century. Vestiges of God and religion’s moral grounding are omnipresent in the film. In one scene, Fitzgerald (Fitzgerald is described by Glass later as being an elk on the run) tells a tale of his father who found God up a tree in the form of a squirrel in the wilderness and then proceeded to shoot the animal and “eat that son of a bitch.” If we were to take a Christian slant on this, “God is a squirrel” and man, being in God’s image, makes us squirrels too. Although it is enticing to only see The Revenant through a JeudoChristian slant, the film collages beliefs. Christian spirituality is complimented by the spirituality of the Arikara (Ree) and Pawnee tribes people featured in the film.
In April 2016, Congress passed the National Bison Legacy Act in which the bison is to become a historical symbol of America, alongside the bald eagle. Bison feature heavily in the film and permeate
Glass’s dreams. These images of piled bison heads recall the government’s drive to vanquish the Native
Americans by destroying their livelihoods. Yet we see this representation through Glass’s perspective which suggests symbolic evidence of revivification. In a dream, Glass has a vision where he flounders towards a giant pile of buffalo skulls. This scene recreates the infamous photo of buffalo skulls often used
56 to symbolise the purposeful annihilation of the buffalo by colonialists to interfere with Indigenous subsistence economies, dispossess the land, and establish capitalist property relations. The dream sequence thus points to the appalling consequences of capitalist accumulation by colonial dispossession for Indigenous peoples in North America.
Fig 5.1: Photo of mid 1870’s pile of bison skulls. Source unknown. Burton Historical Detroit Public Library.
Other symbolism in the film involves birds which are representational of the lost spirits of the
American Indians. In one flashback scene, Hawk, Glass’s son is holding a large black bird and in another, a small bird which flutters out the bullet wound in Glass’s wife. In each of these instances, Glass is rendered as being closer to American Indian ideologies than he is of his own, white Puritan beliefs. In the initial attack scene, the ground is littered with bodies and smoke filling the air and the camera pans up to show several birds circling the area before panning back to show some Pawnee standing over the bodies
57 of their own men chanting, what is presumably, a spiritual orison. After the scene in which Glass cauterises the wound in his neck with fire and gunpowder, a large black bird is displayed high in a tree looking down at Glass. This follows immediately on from when Hawk has been killed by Fitzgerald so perhaps the bird is representative of his spirit watching over Glass. Birds were often seen by American
Indians as intermediaries between humans and the sky spirits, “as messengers that could carry prayers and pleas up to the gods and return with their power and blessing.”87
Natives in the film are often situated as elevated on screen, often depicted as physically being above white men. During the opening scene, Pawnee men are shown as circulating the ridge, looking down on the trappers’ camp and during this battle, Glass shoots a native who succeeded in ascending a tree, infiltrating their camp and is shooting bows at the white men from above. Another instance of corporeal superiority is when Glass climbs a small incline to see a Pawnee devouring a bison.
Fig 5.2: Hugh Glass begging for food.
Approaching cautiously, Glass falls to his knees and then flat onto his stomach when the man points his bow and arrow at Glass. Throughout the rest of the scene, Glass is displayed as being subordinate to the natives. This is a volteface as American Indians have long felt to feel subordinate to
87 Lynch, Patricia Ann. Native American Mythology A to Z. New York: Facts On File, 2004. Print. p14.
58 colonising peoples. Filmmakers have utilised the western genre to comment on historical and political events and there can be an analysis of changes in society which are represented in neo westerns. With the evolution of new perceptions, the Native Americans image was revised as America became more responsive towards ethnic minorities. Prior to the above scene, Glass is mauled by a bear. At the beginning of the segment, multiple images are contrasted with each other. The bear which attacks Glass is protecting her cubs, just as Glass is protecting his half Native American son. The scene has been compared to that of rape88 and I contend it is both a physical and metaphorical rape and could be allegorised to the violation of American Indians land. The result of the bear attack leaves Glass unable to talk and walk; Iñárritu renders him as being at the mercy of the terrain.
Patricia Limerick states, “Indian women . . . by marrying [white] traders, bridged the meeting of cultures in the fur trade,” a fact that immediately debases “the image of the utterly selfreliant, single male fur trappers.”89 However, this is not a polyphonic or homogeneous environment for their offspring so we witness Glass warning his son to “be invisible” and informing the child that the other trappers “only see the colour of your skin.” In cautioning his child him to be silent, Glass subjects his son to the objectification American Indians have long suffered from. It could be contended that The Revenant adheres to many of the tropes of the Squaw Man Films where the lead character has knowledge of both cultures in conflict and often their languages and positions him to resolve disputes but can also formulate a critique of racial, religious and cultural supremacy which is driving the triumph over the West. These films often portray a trapper and his son “resisting those dichotomies and the legal and illegal double standards that support them.”90 Linville contends the hero of the film may also find themselves married to an Indian and Glass and his son fits this squaw mould. Glass married a Pawnee woman and is raising a
88 The Drudge Report “DiCaprio Raped By Bear In Fox Movie” December 1st 2015
59 halfPawnee son. Glass’s spiritual awareness is firmly rooted in his Christian heritage and his espoused culture. Glass’s interaction with Native’s throughout the narrative urge him to exercise mercy in attestation of God’s sovereignty. Natives are presented as being as one with the earth, in stark contrast to the American, French and British settelers taking control of the land’s bounty. American Indians’ spirituality is shown as being unburdened by capitalism and the constructed artifices of Christianity in the form of sacraments and creeds.
Rendering Glass’s son as being halfPawnee is critical in this analysis, and although he is killed which could be considered as staving off a parallel contemporary America, I think the film illustrates an othering in allowing American Indians to be integrated into family life. Silverman underscores the cost to the subject of physically internalising inflexible despotic consequences for unity thus; “the aspiration to wholeness and unity not only has tragic personal consequences but also calamitous social effects, since it represents one of the most important psychic manifestations of difference.”91 This unity in relation to
American mens’ identification, has historically restricted others from achieving liberties in the United
States yet has worked to help white men identify as unified beings. Mary Douglas in 1966 claimed those who do not fit into the dominant models of a white, patriarchal society are seen as polluting92 and perhaps therefore, as a complete outcast, is why Hawk had to die.
91 Silverman, Kaja. “Masochism and Male Subjectivity.” Camera Obscura 17. 1988. p34 92 Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger; an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger, 1966. Print. p 34
60
Fig 4.3: Hawk, Glass’s son, wading through a stream.
The frontier myth, according to Slotkin, involves “the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the American Indians who originally inhabited it, “has been, in the popular imagination, “the means to [the American] achievement of a national identity.”93 And so this frontier is a cogent excrescence of Lockean liberalism. Due to the romanticised affiliation with Lockean state of nature, American selfhood and western wilderness are amalgamated in the western genre. The frontier is a place where persons renew the individualism implicit in the original liberal social contract is predicted first on the identification and elimination of the savages. Hence, the state of nature from Locke requires the effacement of American Indians. This furthers why the halfNative boy had to die and why he is subject to racial prejudice amongst the trappers. The ongoing conflict between the imperialist, westward
93 Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentiethcentury America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Print. p10
61 expanding Americans and the indigenous Arikaras is similar to contemporary American society which is reflected in the fear of death at that hands of the Natives which renders the unit of trappers inadequate and disparate from each other. If there is a dissonance from within, there will be a point where trust dissolves and man will become narcissistic and selfinterested. Sadar and Davies argue that in a place of hatred people should seek to make discernable “the nature, conditions and dimensions of the problem so that new debates, new constituencies of dissent that bridge the divide between America and the rest of the world can be built ”and in doing so, they claim “a patriotic nationalism, which constructs US national identity in a partial and insular way, might be resisted.”94
Annette Hamilton employs the term “national imaginary” to describe the way in which the
“national self” is distinguished from the “national others.”95 Cultural identity, according to Hamilton is not simply set around a set of positive images but also in relation to the opposing images of the other against which the self and the nation can be discerned. The American Indian, in spite of continuing to be in the background within the western genre has become a primary force for revisionist ecological values.
Instead of tainting the dominant culture, these depictions have come to be seen as liberators who demonstrate a more natural relationship with the environment.
94 Sardar, Ziauddin, and Merryl Wyn. Davies. Why Do People Hate America? New York: Disinformation. Print. 2002. p xxi 95 Hamilton, Annette. “Fear and Desire: Aborigines, Asians and the National Imaginary.” Australian Cultural History 9. 1990 p 18
62
Fig 5.4: Pile of bison skulls.
The Declaration of Independence explains that life is a choice between agreeing to government created entirely out of human artifice or returning to nature where the individual is able to resume the full exercise of natural powers.96 Such a return to nature remains a viable option under government, and perhaps this is why The Revenant, released amidst a tempestuous political climate, creates this as a foregrounding point. Westerns capture “our unquenchable need to express our individualism, our unfailing drive to test ourselves against the many challenges that nature and our fellow man throw against us, and the unending desire to see the solitary good man beat the odds against the forces of conformity
96 Pearson, Sidney A., Print the Legend: Politics, Culture and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford. Maryland: Lexington Books. Print. 2009. p134
63 and uniformity.”97 The western genre portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the submission of nature in the name of civilisation, or the territorial rights of the Native Indians of the frontier.
The opening scene immediately throws the viewer into the midst of the battle between the settlers and the American Indians and from the very beginning, the audience is immersed in nature. This scene plays with colours and sounds, and an image appears as a stream which continues on screen for an entire minute without anything else being revealed to the viewer. The entire scene is set from a reverse point of view shot until the camera draws back, revealing a mediated point of view shot where Hugh
Glass and his son are shown wading through the water, which it transpires, is located within a forest. The fact this scene of natural landscape is the first of the film and is shot from a rear of view perspective is highly emblematic if it is read in relation with the history of the western. Landscape, wilderness and a sense of place have always been meaningful in the genre which came to be defined ‘western’ because of the name delimiting the locality of its setting. The sound of the stream continues until a shot rings out and the nature is thus disrupted and the film cuts back to the fur trapper’s camp. Through using wide lenses and a small camera, the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezk produces elastic shots in order to move from the objective to the subjective. From the very moment an arrow infiltrates the camp, shooting a trapper through the throat, the Arikara’s adeptness in using rudimentary weapons such as bows and arrows, far outweighs the white man’s competence in battle. Iñárritu wished to get into the mindset of each lead character from the opening sequence. The camera begins travelling with the trappers then back to Hugh Glass’s point of view, back to the Native American’s daughter who gets captured, back into a man who shoots a horse who the camera follows and then back to Glass’s viewpoint all in quick succession.
Tracking shots in this sequence are interplayed with pointofview shots interspersed with violence following one combatant to another; trappers are running and the camera follows them until a Native
97 Moser, Barry. Cowboy Stories. San Francisco: Chronicle. Print. 2007. p9
64 American succeeds in killing one of them and the camera follows this man until he is shot by a trapper.
The American idea of the sovereign individual who has dominion over nature is inverted in this film.
Richard Slotkin in Regeneration Through Violence claims that central to the mythology of the American frontier, there is a resurrection through violence which claims that the American individual obtains transcendence by first regressing into a more primitive self.98 He claims the American individual gains transcendence and regeneration by primarily retrogressing into a more primitive self in the wilderness and finally he can emerge as American. The bear attack on Glass could be considered to be an anthropomorphising display to illustrate the inherent aggressive nature of men. It is also significant that throughout the film, Glass wears the fur of the bear that attacked him, thus assimilating the primal nature of the animal. Slotkin’s conception of the wilderness is decidedly Turnerian. In The Significance of the Frontier in American History Frederick Jackson Turner interprets the frontier both as a topographical place and as a concept. The frontier demarcates an expanse in which civilisation comes into contact with the wilderness, but it also epitomises a conceptual locus where the practicalities of the future clash with the actualities of the present. In 1983 when Turner claimed that “the American character did not spring fullblown from the Mayflower," but that "it came out of the forests and gained new strength each time it touched a frontier"99 he wished to assert that the wilderness bore an American identity and bolstered its plausibility throughout the 19th century. The binary constructed here between savagery and temptation or it represented a new garden if tended to properly by European settlers and although these opposing views of the wilderness shared the goal of establishing a civilisation by eliminating obstacles presented by nature, the state of wilderness that originally characterised the nation eventually became an origin of national honour and identity for America. In The Philosophy of the Western there is a central notion of
98 Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 16001860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Print. 1973. 99 Robbins, James. Native Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism, and the New American Identity. New York: Encounter. Print. 2013. p256
65 political philosophy of the western, yet what permeates each chapter is the idea of nature in both western films and John Locke’s conception of the individual.
Locke claimed every man is self governing and there is no natural or foundational political authority. He found the philosophical rationale for this innate liberality in what he named “a state of nature”100 and a subtext of The Revenant involves an attempt by the French and other settlers to civilise natural spaces. Locke also claimed that “in the beginning, all the world was America.” In referring to the
American Indian’s system of communal landownership, hence in the beginning, Locke claimed all people held land in common. However, in assessing that native’s actual practises are antiquated, Locke asserts that American Indians represent the past and the settlers represent the world to come. The Revenant disbands this assertion, most clearly through a sign displayed at a French settlers camp, hanging beside a hung body of a native. It reads On est tous des sauvages we are all savages. However, the whites are the sole savages of the film and the only good man is one who has “gone native”, in a James Fenimore
Cooper tradition. Such a depiction helps in redressing manifold sins of classical westerns in the past.
Locke thought that the natural world’s purpose was a form of thought experiment, an imaginary space in which he was able to arrive at the conclusion that individuals are endowed with a foundational liberality. Indeed, within the film, Glass’s conscience is guided through moral dilemmas through poetic dream sequences, and furthering Locke’s belief that nature is a space where humans are naturally set free, the actuality of nature both hinders and aids Glass’s journey. In The Trouble with Wilderness, William Cronon claims there is a view of nature which requires humans to be absent from it, leading to the paradox: “If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, when out very presence in nature represents its fall...As a result, wilderness loses its power to authenticate our lives as soon as we try to take advantage of its redemptive potential.”101 Glass, however, is seen as a character
100 Mexal, Stephen J. “Two Ways to Yuma” in The Philosophy of the Western. Eds. McMahon, Jennifer L., and B. Steve. Csaki. Lexington: University of Kentucky. Print. 2010. p71 101 Cronon, William. "The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature." in Cronon. William ed Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Print. 1996.
66 who succeeds in surviving all of the elements at their most extreme and is portrayed as being a mythic force of nature and in doing so, Iñárriu depicts the protagonist in an unique portrayal of tenacity. Through multiple hindrances, Glass and multiple other characters are shown in pain; grunts and screams pervade the film and the viscerality of the cinematography allows the audience to react to the suffering inflicted upon certain characters. Blood pours from Glass’s neck when he first gets a chance to drink from a stream following the bear attack, leaving the viewer wondering if the film is built upon pain which is seemingly intrinsically linked with nature. Traja Laine claims regarding pain are there is a “clear affective and experiential discrepancy between [the character] and the spectator.”102 This forms an ethical space for the audience to not only experience Glass’s pain but also acquiesce their own role of becoming accomplices of the pain whilst realising nature is a utopian space and simultaneously a site of paranoia with regard to everything that diminishes masculinity.
In a flashback scene, Glass’s wife tells him “The wind cannot defeat a tree with strong roots. If you look at its branches, you swear it will fall. But if you watch the trunk, you see its stability.” Iñárriu visualises this metaphor with low angle shots of trees that tremble in the wind during moments of looming apprehension during the course of the film. The wind evokes tribulation and the writhing branches illustrate hardship, the trunk embodies stoicism and the roots capture a fight for survival.
Breathing becomes a commutative tool, due to the film’s sparse dialogue and at three separate points in the film, Iñárriu and his cinematographer, Lubezki use interference with the physical lens to instigate a further understanding of concept and authenticity. Fitzgerald stabs Hawk, Glass’s son whilst Glass is half buried and he eventually manages to crawl out of the shallow grave towards the body of his dead son, following spots of blood which blotch the virgin white snow and he catches his breath in shock. He lays his head on his son’s body whilst making a plethora of animalistic noises and the camera impinges on this
102 Laine, Tarja. Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies. London: Bloomsbury. Print. 2011. p122
67 scene so intensely that the Glass’s breath mists the camera lens. This consumes the entire frame but immediately after this, there is a shot of the sky where this breath amalgamates with the clouds in flight above the infinite vastness of nature. This mise en scéne evokes an expanse of raw nature and dramatises the landscape.
Fig 5.5: Glass tracking across wilderness.
The landscape is constantly being reviewed and witnessed throughout the film which aids in reaffirming an unmediated stance of sublime superfluity rather than the constrained revenge narrative which impels the film towards the beginning. Glass’s extreme physical pain and valour vindicated his odyssey and he becomes subsumed by the American frontier obtained from a vision of wilderness assimilates the filmic garden of Eden.
Glass is shown prospering, or at the very least, sustaining through his adeptness of the land and its animals. He guzzles live fish and devours bison liver but this is not depicted as gratuitous killing, it is essential for Glass’s survival. Men in the film are depicted as being thrown back into the raw conditions of nature. They have to kill or die; the privation of life in nature and the wilderness. Hegemonic
68 masculinity is, to a certain extent, configured by a subjugating and dissented relation to nature. In receiving hegemonic masculinity is constructed on the imperative to constrain all which is placed under the term nature. At every angle throughout the film, nature conquers the individual. There is a clear history and mythology of men returning to nature, reevoking what hegemony has coaxed them to subdue which strongly suggests that men have felt diminished by the relation to nature that hegemonic masculinity has imparted. When men have been associated with nature, it has been done in an essentialist way which have reinforced hegemonic masculinity as fixed in nature. In the 21st century it is time to examine nature in relation to masculinity and see the neo western male protagonist as being more complex and sensitive and not revert to the traditional sense of the western which attaches wilderness and nature to performances of hegemonic and heterosexual masculinity.
Nature is depicted in both an internal and external context, the former refers to a spiritual and corporeal life and the latter an ascendency over those who are considered closer to nature as well as traditional nature in the form of wilderness and animals. The vision of a natural savage deconstructs decades of natural manliness of the western hero and indicates a new reversed gaze directed at the hero. I would like to conjecture that Glass can be considered to be the ultimate cowboy. Indeed, he exists between the wilderness and savagery of the world yet is inherently inclined to justice and revenge. The cowboy, an icon of the western male body can easily be read as prototypical of American masculinity and can thus be seen as partial, rather than a sign of consistency in the midst of body, nature, and society: “the rhetoric of the landscape work[ing] in favor of the particular masculine ideal Westerns enforce.”103 The
West, together with its mythic genre, is therefore no longer a safe place: if manhood is not authentic, its central position in the western can be questioned together with the rights and the social power usually associated with it. According to Cawelti, the central function of the western lies in giving “symbolic
103 Tompkins, Jane P. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press. Print. 1992. p77.
69 expression”104 of contemporary value conflicts including individualism and individual freedom alongside heroism. In identifying with the hero of the film, there are values of nature which are contested against civilisation. Ultimately, the result of this confrontation with nature and violence affirms traditional
American values such as the segregation between masculine and feminine roles and the nucleus of religion in life. In a period post 9/11 where these traditional American values have been called into question, the Western too has had to adapt to depict this changing society instead of reaffirming traditional beliefs.
Glass is effectively isolated in the film, fending for himself against nature; snow and the cold and the vicious creatures thrown at him by an unsympathetic deity. Since nature is a losing battle, Iñárritu frames the conflict in The Revenant as one among men, tainted by greed and spiritlessness. The myth of the American West is often recognised as a key element in the construction of national identity represented through independence, ingenuity, brevity and the conquest of nature. Glass’s character encompasses all of these traits in varying form yet I contend he never fully triumphs over conflicting human nature or manifested nature. In bookending the film with wind and breath in darkness, Iñárritu draws parallels between the two. He does not determine the tension between the dyad as they are engaged with each other as parts of natural cycles of renewal. It takes light to vanquish the darkness and to give definition where there was once only bodily inclinations. There is a clear history and mythology of men returning to nature, reevoking what hegemony has coaxed them to subdue which strongly suggests that men have felt diminished by the relation to nature that hegemonic masculinity has imparted. When men have been associated with nature, it has been done in an essentialist way which have reinforced hegemonic masculinity as fixed in nature. Thoreau states in Walden “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had
104 Cawelti, John. Adventure, mystery, and romance: formula stories as art and popular culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print.1976. p194
70 to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”105 This typifies Glass’s quest: he has survived the pastoral, the only divinity in the neo western venerated more than man himself. At every angle, nature conquers the individual.
105 Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Philadelphia, PA: Courage. Print. 1990. p31
71 Conclusion
In the previous four chapters, I have outlined how mythology, religion, capitalism and nature have built upon a discourse for neo westerns, stemming from classical themed westerns. Whilst all the films are generally preoccupied with a variety of contemporary social issues, defining masculinity remains the focal point of many neo westerns. The influences of secondwave feminism forced masculine ideals to evolve into the form of masculinity that is in place within contemporary society. Neo westerns retain classic western themes to find resources to define masculinity. However, a focus on masculinity shows the resilience of the western has limits. The neo western’s capacity to absorb a revision of gender identities hides resistance ultimately highlighting the attraction of the individual man, who is unable to configure his identity and masculinity alone. The power of the neo western lies in highlighting that the mythic notion of individual masculinity, conveyed by classic westerns, is ruptured. Anxieties of men losing their mastery and their identity are what these neo westerns present. The neo western is still a stage for masculinities, yet I believe that the crisis of masculinity which compels filmmakers to constantly revisit the theme of masculinity is a result of the current political atmosphere. The current crisis in masculine power figures seems to indicate a greater systematic anxiety in post 9/11 society that is rooted in the failures of western hero ideology.
The revisionist myth connected to post 9/11 American society showed that, rather like contemporary American conflicts (Iraq War of 2003 and the Afghanistan War of 2001) the narrative of the West is complex and in need of balanced perspectives. Observers have noted that popular national sentiment following September 11th 2001 may have sparked a new cycle of the Western, following an era in which the genre underwent a revisionist change of direction. Ryan Dilley asserted how tempting it is to analyse the nation’s efforts at self reflection following 9/11 to explain the outbreak of neo westerns.
“Could it be that America at war (and at odds with many former allies) is looking back to it’s heroic wild
72 west past for inspiration and comfort?”106 As Jane Tompkins, Richard Slotkin and Lee Clark Mitchell have accentuated, the western is a privileged expanse for the depiction of masculinity. The analyses provided in the previous chapters validate the opinion that neo westerns are proof of how men respond to the crisis of masculinity, which has been created by shifts in gender norms, threats to national security and socioeconomic change in the epoch of globalisation.
William J. Devlin defines neo westerns differing from classical westerns by the way it
"demonstrates a decline, or decay, of the traditional western ideal...The moral framework of the West...that contained...innocent and wholesome heroes who fought for what is right, is fading. The villains, or the criminals, act in such a way that the traditional hero cannot make sense of their criminal behavior."107
A repetitive set of images or patterns can help audiences a reassuring vision from the past, and as show, the neo westen’s genealogy is visible, but open to experiments and new negotiations.108 Neo westerns capture traditional definitions and representations of manhood in a more challenging way, launching a new discourse of what it means to be a man at the turn of the millennium. Although types of masculinity can change, the neo western capital continues to reproduce itself by masquerading indefatigable gender dynamics under ingrained narratives, showing contemporary men the possibility of occupying the leading position that the long history of the genre has granted them. Present manhood in neo westerns is related to past westerns visions of masculinity. The white man is, however, still at the centre of every film narrative.
The straight white male’s identity is still hegemonic but intermale relationships, as present in all four films, hinder a conclusive version of masculinity. Even though the patriarchy may be presented as troubled, it is alive and well. The four chapter have brought to the fore how gender is under attack and the films scrutinise known dynamics of male gender relations, definitions and representations in the attempt
106 Dilley, Ryan. “Is it High Noon for the Western?” BBC News Online. 25 September 2003. Accessed 21 April 2016. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3132746.stm 107 Devlin, William .J. “No Country for Old Men: The Decline of Ethics and the West(ern).” In eds McMahon, Jennifer and Csaki, Steve B. The Philosophy of the Western (221239). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Print. 2010. p228 108 Bordin, Elisa. Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the Millennium. Verona: Ombre Corte. Print. 2014. p55
73 to retain positions of power. The neo western is an arena to display new reflections on manhood but is also symbolic place to restate it.
74
List of figures
Fig 1.1 Sidney Nolan. “Ned Kelly” 1946. National Gallery of Australia. Canberra.
Fig 2.1 The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford. Jesse being shot by Robert Ford. 2007.
Fig 2.2 The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford. Bob Ford watching Jesse bathe. 2007.
Fig 2.3 The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford. Jesse James shrouded in fog. 2007.
Fig 2.4 Caspar David Friedrich. “Wanderer of a Sea of Fog.” 1818. Kunsthalle Hamburg
Germany.
Fig 2.5 The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford. Shot of inside of a saloon. 2007.
Fig 2.6 The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford. Reflection of lens showing Jesse James’ body.
Fig 3.1 No Country For Old Men. Reflection of Sheriff Bell on television screen. 2007. Fig 3.2 No Country For Old Men. Chigurh strangling a deputy. 2007 Fig 3.3 No Country For Old Men. Chigurh’s weapon of choice. 2007. Fig 3.4 No Country For Old Men. “Hold still please, sir.” 2007. Fig 3.5 No Country For Old Men. Chigurh washes the blood from his hands. 2007. Fig 3.6 No Country For Old Men. Boy giving his shirt to an injured Chigurh. 2007.
75 Fig 4.1 There Will Be Blood. Oil on the lens. 2007. Fig 4.2 There Will Be Blood. Daniel Plainview and his son, H.W. 2007. Fig 4.3 There Will Be Blood. Baptism by Oil. 2007. Fig 4.4 There Will Be Blood. Daniel watching the rig burn. 2007. Fig 5.1 Photo of mid 1870’s pile of bison skulls. Source unknown. Burton Historical Detroit
Public Library.
Fig 5.2 The Revenant. Hugh Glass begging for food. 2015. Fig 5.3 The Revenant. Hawk, Glass’s son wading through a stream. 2015. Fig 5.4 The Revenant. Pile of bison skulls. 2015. Fig 5.5 The Revenant. Glass tracking across wilderness. 2015.
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