Sacred Heart University DigitalCommons@SHU School of Communication and Media Arts Faculty Communication and Media Arts (SCMA) Publications 1995 Cowboy Wonderland, History, and Myth: 'It Ain't All that Different than Real Life William G. Simon Tisch School of the Arts, New York University Louise Spence Sacred Heart University Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/media_fac Part of the American Film Studies Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Simon, William G. and Spence, Louise, "Cowboy Wonderland, History, and Myth: 'It Ain't All that Different than Real Life" (1995). School of Communication and Media Arts Faculty Publications. Paper 17. http://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/media_fac/17 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Communication and Media Arts (SCMA) at DigitalCommons@SHU. It has been accepted for inclusion in School of Communication and Media Arts Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@SHU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. COWBOY WONDERLAND, HISTORY, AND MYTH: 'IT AIN'T ALL THAT DIFFERENT THAN REAL LIFE' WILLIAM G. SIMON andLOUISE SPENCE "If I wasn't real," said Alice?half tries' myths, the film focuses on the dis laughing through her tears, it all junction between what it sees as historical seemed so ridiculous?"I shouldn't events and the representation of those be able to cry." events in the signs and symbols associated with our national culture, the language of "I hope you don't suppose those are national [belonging. real tears?" Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt. the ?Through Looking Glass Employing theWild West Show as a late nineteenth-centuryprototype for the com Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting plex of popular entertainment forms that Bull's Lesson was Robert Alt History take their source fromwestern historical man's bicentennial film. Released for the materials, Buffalo Bill and the Indians Fourth of weekend in 1976, the film July dramatizes the creative acts of transmuta examines the western both as a national tion and linkage as history is transfigured myth and as a commercial entertainment into the myths that bind our imagined form; indeed, one might see the film's community, the Nation (Anderson 15).1 project as an expos? of the ideological As such, the film carries out one of the functioning of thewestern, itswhite male central strategies thatRichard Slotkin has hero, and the Native American in nearly since suggested for undermining the ideo 100 years of American popular culture. logical power of western myth-making: it The film stars Paul Newman in the role of demystifies the myth-making process by the and de William F. Cody, famous Indian scout and rehistoricizing mythic subject an account the buffalo hunter, who, at the time of the tailing of myth-making Fatal Environment story, is co-owner and star of a part enterprise (The 20). rodeo, part-circus, part-melodrama travel ing spectacle known as Buffalo Bill's Wild Focusing on the processes throughwhich West. Seizing upon Buffalo Bill's Wild the myth of the western hero has been West as a crucial moment in the historical constructed, the film questions themoral process through which experience is authority of the hero and the conse transformed into the entertainment indus quences forNative Americans of western literature, art, drama, and film. Buffalo William G. Simon is chair of the Department of Bill and the Indians, a "historiographie Cinema Studies at theTisch School of theArts metafiction" (Hutcheon ix-x, 5-6), con at New York He teaches a University. regularly fronts us with the politics of history and course entitled 'The Myth of the Last West the politics of historical ern/' Louise Spence teaches media studies at representation and Sacred Heart University. She is co-authoring a suggests that the story of the Ameri book on Oscar Micheaux for Rutgers Univer can West is less a tale of civilization, Press. sity progress, heroic action, and triumph than Copyright? 1995 by W. G. Simon and L. one of oppression, displacement, exclu Spence sion, and defeat. JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 47.1-3 (Spring-Fall 1995) 67 This content downloaded from 74.217.196.17 on Wed, 17 Jul 2013 09:38:48 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Buffalo Bill flaunts the headdress of his Indian ancestry in theWild West Show arena, in Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Copyright 1976 United Artists Corporation. The action of the film takes place between quickly (Frantz 122). Nor was he an ex 1885, when Sitting Bull joined Buffalo ceptional scout or hunter (Buscombe 91, Bill's Wild West, and 1890,when Sitting 239). But his show set a pattern that has Bull was killed at Standing Rock, also the been an enormous influence on the por year the census reports said that there trayal of thewestern hero. were no longer any vast tracts of land remaining forAmerican settlement (Lim The 'Real' Versus the erick 21)2 and just a few years before Mythic Frederick Jackson Turner would proclaim In 1922,Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a New the close of "the frontier" (Cronon, Mexico cowboy and writer of western Miles, and Gitlin 14).3 The film is set in a tales, claimed Cody's show was responsi period of historical transitionduring which ble for the major misconceptions about new symbolic representations are emerg cowboys and the West (Taylor 67).4 In ing?and Buffalo Bill realizes thatboth the Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the cowboy (ac Indians and the buffalo on which his leg tually still a hired hand on horseback) was end was based are vanishing. part of a national morality play: sharp Inmany ways?since he followed Kit Car shooting, trickriding, leaping fromgallop son and outlived George Custer and Wild inghorses to save numerous virgins riding Bill Hickok?Bill Cody was the last per in "the authentic Deadwood stage" from sonification of western heroism (Stek attacks by painted savages. "The real" messer 253). Cody himself was not much seems to have been an important part of of a cowboy; he triedworking cattle for the appeal of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, as six weeks or so in 1877 but left pretty audiences across America and Europe got 68 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 47.1-3 (Spring-Fall 1995) This content downloaded from 74.217.196.17 on Wed, 17 Jul 2013 09:38:48 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions to see real Indians, real cowboys, and the added. A male voice declaims a second real celebrity, Buffalo Bill. As an 1892 account of what we are going to see: article in the London Evening News and "Ladies and Gentlemen, you are about to Post put it, "We hear a great deal about experience not a show for entertainment," realism on the stage, where a working but "a revue of down-to-earth events that model of a Westend drawing room is made theAmerican frontier." Further in hailed as a triumphof art, but the Buffalo creasing the level of dissonance, the Bill show is somethingmore than realism voice-over makes claims for a serious his ?it is reality" (Blackstone). torical project that seems at odds with the language of the previous title.The familiar Bill and the or Buffalo Indians, Sitting side-show barker form of address contra Bull's Lesson History is concerned pre dicts both the denial of the entertainment with such effects of cisely interrogating mode and the apparent seriousness of the "the real." Consider the film's . opening narration's historical claim (". real sequence: before the first is even image events enacted by men and women of the seen, a is heard. as a cavalry bugle Then, American frontier"). second bugle call is played, the film's first image shows an American flag being As the voice-over continues, intoning the raised over a western fortress. As the motifs of civilization and savagery, camera tilts up with the to snow flag progress, and nationhood,6 the voice-over covered mountains, the names of the seems to generate the images. Immedi film's backers De Laurentiis and (Dino ately after the voice extols the virtues of David Susskind) are in let superimposed "anonymous settlers," the camera pulls tering that imitates the serifed heavily back to reveal a frontier familyworking and ornamental embellishments typescript outside a cabin. Right after it refers to the of theater programs. nineteenth-century settlers' need to survive the "savage in The wind howls in the The background. stincts of man," a band of marauding calls, fortress, mountains, and bugle flag, Indians ride in, attacking the family and wind invoke a familiar and conven highly abducting a young white woman. tionalized motif: the wilderness fort, at the of the frontier,main poised edge While apparently proposing an authorial tained the in the name ofAmer by cavalry statement of the film's intentand concep ican nationhood. tion, the voice itself lacks authority. It is an older man's voice with a hint of While a third bugle call is heard and the raspy and a touch of camera pans left across the mountain hyperbole rhymingoratory; it lacks the conviction necessary for its vista, a playful title appears announcing words to be taken as an authorial "Robert Altman's Unique and Heroic En paratext. Its status also seems in with terprise of Inimitable Lustre." Thus, a competition the film's and ostensible dissonance of discourses is already sug public "author," Robert Altman, identified in comic gested. The humorously self-conscious just show-biz tones.