Linfield University DigitalCommons@Linfield Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works 2012 American Myth-Busting Joe Wilkins Linfield College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons, and the Nonfiction Commons DigitalCommons@Linfield Citation Wilkins, Joe, "American Myth-Busting" (2012). Faculty Publications. Published Version. Submission 17. https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs/17 This Published Version is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It is brought to you for free via open access, courtesy of DigitalCommons@Linfield, with permission from the rights-holder(s). Your use of this Published Version must comply with the Terms of Use for material posted in DigitalCommons@Linfield, or with other stated terms (such as a Creative Commons license) indicated in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, or if you have questions about permitted uses, please contact [email protected]. MEDIA THE ARTS much sway in our contemporary cul- American Myth-Busting tural psyche, consider instead Rambo, or A the latest iteration of Die Hard, or even new breed ofwesterns tells it like it is The Hurt Locker- really any big-screen BY JOE WILKINS affair featuring an honorable, lonely, de- cidedly masculine hero staring down the bad guys. Truly, many of the shoot' em-up GROWING UP ON THE PLAINS of eastern history ofcivilization , the event which in blockbusters we see each summer are di- Montana, I saw my fair share of westerns. spite of stupendous difficulties was con- rect mythological descendants of those We didn't have a VCR when I was a boy, and summated more swiftly, more completely, dime-novel westerns, which posited that, my mother didn't allow us to watch much more satisfactorily than any like event with right intention, violence will lead to TV, but westerns were part ofthe general at- since the westward migration began-I stability and community; that the present mosphere. The bachelor farmer who lived mean the conquering of the West, the situation is somehow degraded or dis- across the river played them for my brother subduing of the wilderness beyond the honest and only our hero-violent and and me when he baby-sat us. We watched Mississippi - What has this produced brooding but honest to a fault-will serve them at school on holidays or when we had in the way ofliterature? The dime novel! as tonic and example; and that we might substitutes. I have to say, though, I never The dime novel and nothing else. deeply love the natural world while still much liked westerns. They didn't fit what destroying or vastly altering large tracts I saw in the western world around me. Though the celebratory tone galls, though of it And from President Bush's cowboy Though my mother was a widow raising I take strong issue with (among other foreign policy to local arguments for frack- three children, she didn't need rescue; she things) the phrase "more satisfactorily," ing and mountaintop removal, you see did fine on her own. My grandfather, who and though I'm reading these words no the problem. Stories have power. Despite quit school after the eighth grade to cowboy years later-years that have seen the likes all evidence to the contrary, we'll cling to for a living, wasn't a man of brooding vio- of Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, James whatever myth made us. Even as the water lence and righteousness; he was gentle and Welch, and many others author epic, slips over our noses, we'll keep filling our fun and inquisitive. necessary, and honest works of literature pockets with those same stones. And I'm not the first to level this argu- about the American West-when it comes We need new stories, truer stories. We ment against the mass-market western. In to film (save The Wild Bunch and the more especially need stories that intentionally 1902 (the year the original Reclamation recent "neo-westerns" I'll get to shortly), I take a wrecking ball to those used-up, dead- Act was passed, providing federal moneys find myself mostly agreeing with Norris. wrong myths, which is why I find the last for various irrigation projects across the And this is a problem. two decades' run of neo-westerns- Unfo r- arid West and eventually leading to the Movies matter, deeply, in America, and given, Smoke Signals, Brokeback Mountain, damming of most major western rivers) the simple dishonesties of those dime Down in the Valley, The Assassination ofjesse the novelist and critic Frank Norris an- books, writ large on silver screens across james by the Coward Robert Ford, The Three nounced: the nation, built into the guiding visions Burials of Melquiades Estrada, There Will Be and imaginations of boys and girls from Blood, and No Country for Old Men, among The frontier has disappeared. But Tennessee to Montana, have shaped a others-so heartening. when at last one comes to look for the lit- number of our most insidious American Yes, I know. It's hard to think of the erature that sprang from and has grown mythologies. Though it could be argued Coen brothers' bloody, disturbing adapta- up around the last great epic event in the that neither Stagecoach nor Shane holds tion of Cormac McCarthy's novel (which is 72 O R I O N JULY I AUGUST 2012 even more bloody and disturbing) and think heartening. Yet I would argue there is a dif- ference between the violence of characters like Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men) and the violence transacted in most Hollywood blockbusters. The blockbuster, and the dime novel before it, would have us believe violence can be directed and controlled, used. When em- ployed by the good guy, violence becomes a tool for community, justice, and righ- teousness. When employed by the bad guy, violence leads to division, terror, and profit. This, I think, is stunningly naive. Violence can perhaps be used as a tool, yet it is always more than a tool as well. It is a force beyond its wielder, a force that leads mostly unto itsel£ So Llewelyn Moss steps, even briefly, and despite his self-serving but understand- able intentions, into the brutal world of the cross-border drug war and is irrevocably sucked (along with his blameless wife and a handful of observers) into a sudden, short life of violence. Even Anton Chigurh, who seems for the bulk of the film demoniacally in control, is literally blindsided by violence at the end ofthe movie, when a speeding car slams into him at an intersection. As Chig- urh stumbles from his own vehicle, dazed and bleeding, a tom end of bone spurred through the meat of his forearm, a young boy, witness to the crash, keeps repeating, "Would you look at that fucking bone!" That is true violence. Startling, amoral, beyond us all. Even the devil himself is wrought up in it, is ruined by it. Violence works against the very land we make so much of as well. The many landscapes of the American West may be fussed and fawned over in the western, but Southwest are oil stained and smoking rective and solution, nothing character- those landscapes are also settled, plowed, in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be izes the traditional western more than the grazed, fenced, mined, dug for roads and Blood, and in David Jacobson's Down in elemental honesty of the hero. The west- ditches, and, in a word, destructed. With- the Valley we get any number oflong, heat- em hero is a truth-teller-honest as the out a doubt, the true loser of most every warped shots not of high plains and blue day is long, honest as the horse between traditional western is the land. And here, mountains-but of six-lane superhigh- his knees-and even if our hero's truth again, these new westerns are far more ways, dry aqueducts, and metastasizing forces him to stand outside law or society, honest in their portrayal of this sad, violent housing developments. we know, always, that wherever he stands, history: the landscapes of the American Beyond adherence to violence as a cor- he's right (I think here, especially, of the PHOTOGRAPH I WOODS WHEATCROFT JU L Y I AU G US T 20 12 O R I O N 73 run-up to the Iraq War, and how listening law won't go after the Border Patrol agent your heart will break with so much beauty." to Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on the who accidentally killed his friend and fel- Like the traditional westerns they're work- news, I sometimes found myself almost low cowhand, Melquiades Estrada, it is his ing against, these new westerns honor the convinced that a preemptive war made western duty to do just that. So, he kidnaps rough beauty and renewing power of the sense, was somehow the right thing to do). the agent and on a long trip down into land-despite the violence that's been So, it seems to me right and fitting that if Mexico brutally tortures him. But that's not done to it- and so manage a kind of hope- there is one thing that defines these newer, even the half of it. The force of Pete's grief ful condemnation. Consider the last scene truer westerns, itis their fidelity to dishon- is so strong that the viewer is caught up in of Smoke Signals, where we enter Thomas esty. Time and again in these films, we this violence as well.