On Westerns in general and JohnFord’s in
particular, the nonmalleable nature of the past, and why QuentinTarantino
shouldn’t teachFilmHistory
One of my american westernheroes is notJohnFord,
obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about faceless indians he
killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of
anglosaxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity, and the idea that
that’s hogwash is a verynew idea in relative terms. And you can see it in theCinema
in the thirties and forties, it’s still there. And even in the fifties. But the
thing is, one of my westernheroes is a director namedWilliamWitney who started
doing the serials. He didZorro’sFightingLegion, about22RoyRogersmovies, he did a
whole bunch of Westerns ... JohnFord puts on a Klanuniform [inBirthOfANationThe],
rides to blacksubjugation. WilliamWitney ends a fiftyearscareer directing theDramatics
doing “What You See Is What You Get” [inDarktownStrutters]. I know what side
I’m on. QuentinTarantino, in
conversation withHenryLouisGates, inRootThe.
Let’s start with the obvious and agree thatTarantino
was carried away by his disgust withRacism and his lofty feelings aboutWilliamWitney.
Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it’s been a while since
he took a fresh look at-FortApache[1948] or -CheyenneAutumn[1964] or, given the
fact that he’s collapsing prejudices against indians and africanamericans into
one, SergeantRutledge[1960]. Let’s assume that such Witneytitles as
DrumsOfFuManchu and JungleGirl are as racially enlightened as Tarantino claimsDarktownStrutters
to be. And let’s assume that, as he was soaring on the wings of hisRhetoric, Tarantino
forgot that Ford’s own ancestors were not anglosaxon but celtic, that they were
notexactlywelcomed with open arms when they started emigrating to this country
in great numbers in the1840s, that the memory of anglosaxon oppression was
considerablyfresher inFord’slifetime than it is now (stillprettyfresh back home),
and that the irishexperience played no small part in his films.
But let’s take a closer look at the part
about Ford killing all those “faceless Indians.” First of all, the indians
inFord’sfilms, while never as carefullydrawn as the indians inDelmerDaves’sfilms,
are less “faceless” than they are in many other movies made by directors with
only a fraction of Ford’sknowledge of the actualWest. Secondly, what about all
the other directors who killed so many more faceless indians? What about Hawks (RedRiver), Walsh (TheyDiedWithTheirBootsOn,
DistantDrums, Saskatchewan), Hathaway (ThunderingHerdThe, TenGentlemenFromWestPoint),
Vidor (TexasRangersThe, NorthwestPassage), DeToth (LastOfTheComanches), Mann (LastFrontierThe),
Tourneur (CanyonPassage), and Sherman (Comanche, WarArrow, BattleAtApachePassThe)?
And what about all the lesser directors, theLesleySelanders and LouisKings and
RGSpringsteens and lower and lower down the pole? Does anyone actuallybelieve
that they each chose Westernstories set during theIndianWars because they
unwittinglyshared a burning desire to promote the superiority of anglosaxon
humanity? Or that WilliamWitney laid down theLaw with Republicpresident,
HerbertYates and unequivocallyrefused to make any films about the slaughter of
indians? While making it clear that the chinese were another matter and that a
FuManchuserial was okay? On the other hand, he seems to have made an exception
forSantaFePassage, about an indian scout played byJohnPayne who stands up to a
murderous band ofKiowas.
Some of these directors wielded quite a bit
of power, Hawks most of all. Some of them, like Witney, wielded none and were
in no position to refuse an assignment. The fact that he didn’t wind up making
that many movies featuring pitched battles between anglosaxon cowboys or scouts
or soldiers and hordes of Apaches or Cheyennes or Sioux, gunned down from
behind the safety of rock formations or upended Conestoga wagons or on
horseback, obviously has nothing to do with personal predilections and
everything to do with the reality of slaving away on budgets that didn’t allow
for the cost of feeding, housing, and paying 100 horse-riding extras and a
couple of dozen stuntmen. ShadowsOfTombstone[1953] is moretypicalWitneyfare and
moretypical of lowbudget westerns in general: a-ranchercatches-a-banditwhoturnsouttoworkforthecorruptsheriffandthendecidestorunforofficehimselfwiththehelpofthebeautifullocalnewspaperowner.
In some of the abovementioned cases, the
battle with the indians is nothing more than an episode in a western saga, as
inRedRiver. In Hathaway’sTenGentlemenFromWestPoint, the raid onTecumseh’scamp
is thefinalstep in the militaryEducation of the eponymous tencadets. InVidor’sNorthwestPassage,
the massacre of an entireAbenakivillage builds with a scary momentum that
suggests (or suggested, to certain postMyLaiviewers) that the film itself was
bursting through its own celebratory spirit of the pioneering ethos to reveal a
throbbing inner core of american supremacist bloodlust. In Mann’s LastFrontierThe
and Walsh’sSaskatchewan, as in Ford’sFortApache, a hero with extensive
knowledge of indian ways and a respect for a particular indian tribe [Sioux in
theMann, Cree in theWalsh, Apache in theFord] comes into conflict with a
commanding officer who lives long enough to see his arrogant attempt to assert
the superiority of anglosaxon humanity go down in flames. In certain films, the
indians are played by actual indian actors, albeit often from the wrong tribe [as
was the case in manyFordfilms]. In others, including Daves’s enlightened
BrokenArrow and DrumBeat, they are played by white actors like JeffChandler and
DebraPaget and CharlesBronson. From a distance, it’s veryeasy to view the western
genre as a great abstract swirl of cowboys and indians, the proud Cavalry vs.
the mute savages, a long triumphal march of anglosaxon humanity led byJohnFord
and JohnWayne brought to a dead halt by the sixties. Up close, onemovie at a
time, the picture is quite different. Similarly, the mental image of a film
about theSouth at the turn of the century featuringStepinFetchit as the devoted
manservant of a smalltownjudge sounds like the occasion for a satisfying round
of righteous indignation, while the actual films JudgePriest[1934] and
SunShinesBrightThe[1953] are something else again.
Why would QuentinTarantino, of all people,
buy into such a frozen, shopworn image ofFord and the presixtieswesterngenre,
an image that is now sixdecadesold and more of an antique than anything Ford
ever directed? Of the twelvesoundwesterns Ford made between1939And1964 (I don’t think that Tarantino is referring to the
silents: we’re not talking about actualFilmHistory here, but a politicalconstruct
from an earlier era built around theCavalryTrilogy), some have no
significant action involving indians at all, includingMyDarlingClementine[1946],
unless you insist on counting its one drunken indian, 3Godfathers [1948], and
ManWhoShotLibertyValanceThe[1962]. InWagonMaster[1950], BenJohnson is chased on
horseback by a band ofNavajowarriors, but when they see that he is traveling
with mormons, all hostilities cease, one oppressed people recognizes another.
At theNavajodance to which they’re invited, an outlaw who is hiding among the
Mormons sexuallyassaults a squaw, and theMormonelder has the man publiclyflogged.
Since no indians, faceless or otherwise, are killed, I presume that this is not
one of the films that Tarantino had in mind. InFortApache, it’s Cochise and
Geronimo, hardlyfaceless, who do most of the killing, yet within the framework
of the film they are justified because their people have been corrupted by the
local indian agent and their agreements with the americanGovernment have been dishonored.
InSheWoreAYellowRibbon[1949], in which tensions break out between the indian
agent and a rebelArapaholeader, the final SeventhCavalryraid on theArapahocamp
is bloodless and intended to avoid a massacre. TwoRodeTogether[1961] is about
the problems of returning whiteComanchecaptives to their prejudiced families. InSergeantRutledge,
theNinthCavalry tracks down and battles with a band ofMescaleros dotdotdot but
theNinthCavalry is allblack and the protagonist is its proudest sergeant,
falsel accused of the rape and murder of a whitegirl, surely Tarantino could
see his way to cutting this one a little slack. In essence, I think that we’re
really talking about threemovies; Stagecoach[1939], in which the men on the
eponymous vehicle defend themselves and the women aboard against a band of
Apaches; RioGrande[1950], in which Apaches on a rampage are wiped out by theCavalry
on the mexican side of the border; and SearchersThe[1956]. More about that one
later.
The idea of the americanWest was always more
a matter of solitude and space and the balance between Individualism and community
than a matter of conquest. Along with the city as theater of life in the thirties
or bourgeois existence as genteel prison in the fifties, the idea belonged to
no director or writer, and the culture breathed it long before the movies
began. That the idea was built on the backs of indigenous americans who were,
inFord’sownwords, “cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and
everything else,” was not exactly hidden from view, but relegated to the
background of the story that the culture was telling itself through paintings
and dime novels and traveling shows and, finally, movies, albeit never quite as
comfortably as is now imagined. It’s curious that american -culture and -History
are still so commonly viewed through aNewLeftprism, by means of which 1964 or
thereabouts has become a YearZero of politicalenlightenment; as a consequence,
the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case
back, at a supposedly-gullible and -delusional presixtiesAmerica. It’s
certainlypreferable to rightwingorthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment.
TheNewLeft is now veryold but itsRhetoric lives on, many times removed from its
original context, and thatRhetoric seems to have found a welcome home inFilmCriticism.
Can we really afford to keep saying “them”
instead of “us?” Is it useful to keep looking back at the past, disowning what
we don’t like and attributing it to laughablyfailed versions of our perfectlyenlightened
selves? Should we really give ourselves the license to remakeFilmHistory as we
would like it to be by eliding certain details and amplifying others, in this
case, sellingBirthOfANationThe as the american equivalent ofEternalJewThe,
equating a day of extra work with riding for the realKlan, elevatingWilliamWitney
to theKingOfTheUnderdogs and sweepingJohnFord into the dustbin, and maintaining
that theBlaxploitationGenre was a model of africanamerican empowerment? Why do
we keep insisting on the decomplication ofHistory if not to justify our own
tastes and abolish our discomforts? BirthOfANationThe is indeed a hairraising
experience, and its moments of visual poetry, as stirring as ever, are as close
to its many trulyrepugnant passages as teeth are to lips, to paraphraseMao.
They always will be. Does that oblige us to pretend that the film wasn’t a beacon
for every director ofFord’sgeneration and beyond, for fear that we might appear
racist by doing otherwise? Griffith and ThomasDixon, with assistance fromWoodrowWilson,
helped to reinvigorate the realKlan. They did so unwittingly, not with a piece
of propaganda but with a powerfully dynamic and romantic rendering of the “oldSouth”
of their elders that housed a racist deformation ofHistory at its core, indeed,
if they had been mere propagandists like FritzHippler or VeitHarlan, their film
would never have had the effect that it did. That’s not splitting hairs, but
the thorny, unwelcome, complicated truth. The question is, how do we live with
it?
And how do we live withJohnFord? Just as a
great deal of energy once went into the domestication ofBirthOfANationThe, for
instance, JamesAgee’scontention that Griffith “went to almostpreposterous
lengths to be fair to the negroes as he understood them, and he understood them
as a good type of southerner does”, so an equal amount has gone into smoothing
out Ford, fashioning him as either a drunkenracistmilitaristjingoistic lout
with a gift for making pretty pictures or a Brechtian politicalartist. If I
have some sympathy for the latter position (and zero for the former), it stillseems
like a stretch. But as RaymondDurgnat might have put it, and as JonathanRosenbaum
argued so eloquently in his2004appreciation ofSunShinesBrightForRougeThe, Ford
wasn’t a great artist in spite of the contradictory imperatives of his films
but because of them. His films don’t live apart from the shifts in american culture
and the demands of the filmindustry, but in dialogue with them. Do those films
provide the models of racial enlightenment that we expect today? Of course they
don’t. On the other hand, they are farmore-nuanced and -sophisticated in this
regard than the streamlined commentaries that one reads about them,
behaviorally, historically, and cinematically speaking, and the seeds
of-Ulzana’sRaid and -DeadMan are already growing in-FortApache and -SearchersThe.
Is Ford’s vision “paternalistic?” I suppose it is (and that includes-SunShinesBrightThe
and –SergeantRutledge), but the culture was paternalistic, and holding an
artist working in a popular form to the standards of an activist or a statesman
and condemning him for failing to escape the boundaries of his own moment is a
fool’s game. Maybe it’s time to stop searching forMoralperfection in artists.
The mistake has always been to look for the
paternalistic, find it in Ford’s work, and then make the leap that it is merely
so. If there’s another filmartist who went deeper into the painful contradictions between solitude and community,
or the fragility of human-bonds and -arrangements, I haven’t found one. To look at
Stagecoach or RioGrande or SearchersThe and see absolutely nothing but evidence
of the promotion of anglosaxon superiority is to look away fromCinema itself, I
think. In Stagecoach and RioGrande, the “indians” are a Platonicideal of the
enemy, everyage has one, one can find thesamedevice employed throughout theHistory
of drama, and in countless other westerns. As forSearchersThe, the film becomes
knottier as the years go by. The passage withJeffreyHunter’sComanchewife, Look (BeulahArchuletta)
is just as uncomfortable as the courtroombanjohijinks inSunShinesBrightThe,
particularly the moment when Hunter kicks her down a sandbank, but the comedy
makes the sudden shift to relentless cruelty, and the later discovery
ofLook’scorpse at the site of a Cavalrymassacre of the comanches, that much
more shocking.
Tarantino’s
illchosen words more or less force a comparison between his recent films and
Ford’s. As brilliant as much ofDjangoUnchained and InglouriousBasterds are,
they strike me as relativelystraightahead experiences, there is nothing in
either film to decomplicate; by contrast, one might spend a lifetime
contemplatingSearchersThe or WagonMaster or YoungMr.Lincoln[1939] and
continuallyfind new values, problems, and layers of feeling. And while Tarantino’s
films are funny, inventive, and passionatelyserious about racial prejudice,
there is absolutely no mystery in them, what you see really is what you get. Within the context of americanCinema, Django is a bracing
experience dotdotdot until the moment that ChristophWaltz shootsLeonardoDiCaprio,
turns toJamieFoxx, and exclaims, “I’m
sorry. I couldn’t resist.” The line reading is as perfect as the staging of the
entire scene, but this is thevery instant
that the film shifts rhetorical gears and becomes yet another revengefantasy, that
makes five in a row. Is revenge really the motor of life? Or ofCinema?
Or are they interchangeable? Or
whatever, as long as you know what side you’re on? [CharlieRose]
If Waltz’sadmission of the irresistible
impulse to take vengeance on the ignorantly powerful is the keyline inDjangoUnchained,
the key line inSearchersThe, delivered in thefirstthird of the film, is its
polar opposite. As JeffreyHunter’sMartin and HarryCareyJr.’sBrad prepare to
joinJohnWayne’sEthanEdwards on his quest to find his nieces, Mrs.Jorgensen [OliveCarey]
takesEthan aside and pleads with him: “Don’t let the boys waste their lives on
vengeance.” Ford’sfilm is about the toll of vengeance
on actual humanbeings, while Tarantino’srecentwork is about the celebration of
orgiastic vengeance as a symbolic correction ofHistory. [Only in his own little
mind.] Ford’s film has had a vast and longlasting effect on americanCinema,
while the impact ofTarantino’s film has, I suspect, already-come and -gone. But then, Ford onlyhad the constraints of the studiosystem to
cope with, his own innerconflicts aside, while Tarantino must contend with
something farmore-insidious and -difficult to pin down, the hyperbranded and
anxiouslyselfdefining world of popularculture, within which he is trying to be
artist, grand entertainer, genius, connoisseur, critic, provocateur, and now repairman
ofHistory, all at once. [Accurate.] It makes your head spin. And oneday
in the future, I suppose he might find himself wondering just what he had in
mind when he so recklesslydemeaned one of the greatest artists who ever stood
behind a camera.
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