3. THE HOLLOW MEN

THE HOLLOW MEN: WESTERN HEROES

 “Conquerors,  like cannonballs,  must go on.”  –  Wellington on Napoleon

The Western movie embodies basic mythic themes of American culture that pre-date filmmaking. Before the invention of the motion camera, dime novels and serialized fiction sold adventures of the American West worldwide. Neither film nor fiction has been concerned with historical accuracy but with the America of legend.  Ignorance of history has allowed for the West to function as a blank slate, a perfect psychic location on which to project America’s myths and fantasies of itself. The themes of the Western revolve around freedom, land, space, individuality, and conflict. Whether between Indians and  whites, men and women, young and old, sheriff and outlaw, the Westerner as an individual in violent conflict with the world at large is a theme whose enduring cinematic appeal lives on in films today, in genres outside the Western. The righteous criminal, the rebel cop are direct descendants of the Western hero. The question isn’t whether the Western and its themes possess a constant popular appeal; they do. The real question is as to where the appeal lies therein; between its purported themes of freedom, Good vs. Evil and its actual existential statements about Man in conflict with Life itself.

In his 1955 essay,” The Westerner”,  Robert Warshow attempted to distinguish between “the men with guns”; the gangster and the Western hero . However, he seems only to have succeeded in blurring the lines a little further.  Both characters are solitary figures, unfettered by the traditional ties of work and family.  The gangster measures success in the “power to work injury”; for the Westerner, “ guns constitute a visible moral center”.  The gangster’s strength lies in his lack of self-control, “ not his ability to shoot, but his willingness to shoot first”;  for the Westerner, it is (supposed) self-control that is his strength, and a “point of honor” not to “do it first.”  The appeal of both characters is in their reversal of common cultural assumptions,  their willingness to defy society and to act alone, decisively and violently. “ In the American mind,” wrote Warshow, ” …women are often portrayed as  possessing some kind of deeper wisdom…men [as] fundamentally childish”; but in the Western, the opposite was true, men were realists and women were sentimental and childish: “…she is against killing and being killed and he finds it impossible to explain to her hat there is no point in being “against” these things; they belong to his world.” The gangster appeals to the side of us which refuses to believe in the “normal” possibilities of  happiness and achievement”; “ he is the “no” to the “yes” stamped over our official culture.”

The main distinction Warshow could find (in those Production Code days) was that “when a gangster dies,  his life is always shown to be a mistake…a Westerner preserves his honor, dead or alive.” Warshow finally conceded that “justice is an opportunity, not a motive” for the Westerner’s violence. His distinction between gangster and Westerner breaks down completely when he admits “ The Westerner at best, exhibits a moral ambiguity which darkens his image and saves him from absurdity: whatever the justification, he is a killer of men.”

The Western hero is a killer,  not a champion of truth and justice.  Justice is the pretext for his killing,  not his reason. He is death-obsessed, driven to kill until killed; seemingly filled with a rage at Life,  Fortune, or God; at his own mortality.  It is in denial of his own vulnerability,  his smallness before the universe,  that he seeks to dominate and control events: land is fenced, cattle slaughtered, horses broken, women seduced and abandoned, enemies killed. He is a force for Death,  not Life. He never makes sacrifices for life; all is subordinate to his pride. In Stagecoach (1939), Ringo’s priority is killing the Plummers, not building a life with Dallas; in High Noon (1952), Will is unable to leave with his bride, but ever conscious of public opinion   (even if in negative reaction), he risks his life to defend his pride;  in Red River (1948), Tom Dunson is more interested in remaining in charge (even if he has to kill to do so) than in conceding a mistake and participating in a successful cattle drive that will save him financially; in The Searchers (1956), the hero is more concerned with getting revenge than in rescuing his relatives.  Ethan’s murderous rage, directed at his niece, who has been captured and raised by the Comanches, has less to do with miscegenation than with his unwillingness to concede humanity to the Indians: if a white girl raised as a Comanche is human, why not a Comanche?  And if the Indians are human, rather than disgusting, vicious beasts, than killing them and taking their land might be wrong.

Paul Seydor’s essay, “ The Wild Bunch As Epic” dismisses the conventional Western as                “ something of a fake, with its combination of the excitement of violence, “clean” acts of violence, and an overlay of good vs. evil that was somehow supposed to legitimize everything.” What made Peckinpah’s vision of the West different, wrote Seydor, was his “imaginative impartiality”;  he was merely trying to tell “ a simple story about bad men in changing times”. He wasn’t glorifying violence,  he was only “ telling a story of men who find themselves glorified in violence.” This is a distinction so fine as to be nearly invisible; so,  according to Seydor,  the non-judgemental artistic gaze of Sam Peckinpah redeemed the camera’s (and the audience’s) fascination with violent spectacle; there were fewer pretensions of  it being morally redeeming in its message,  the objective purity of the portrayal of the Bunch’s violence was redeeming enough.  This is letting Peckinpah (and the audience) off a little too easy. Certainly, there was more candor, more honesty about the  characters’ (and by extension, our own) fascination with violent confrontation. It doesn’t,  however, make our preoccupation with violence less disturbing,  but perhaps more so.

What redeems  The Wild Bunch  is that its story is ultimately a tragedy about Man’s failure to make his way in the world; of learning too late the value of human life.  It is better stated in Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954) when the surviving samurai acknowledge their defeat; the farmers win because they re-plant, rebuild, endure,  and keep their community alive; the samurai’s sole talent (and hollow virtue) lies only in  killing.

  “…all visible objects… are but pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the reasoning mask.  If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can a prisoner reach the outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the White Whale is that wall, shoved near me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But it’s enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.”

   “….What is it, what nameless inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm?…”   

–  Herman Melville, Moby Dick