Marvelously granular 'Grit'

In True Grit, Charles Portis reminded his fellow Americans of what was good in the Western. It's worth being reminded again 

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.

One of the many felicitous consequences of Joel and Ethan Coen's decision to remake the 1969 western True Grit is republication of the original Charles Portis novel. First published in 1968 amid the tumult of an angry era of change, True Grit was was a decidedly old-fashioned book. In the decades since, many writers and filmmakers have felt compelled to "reinvent" the Western, to make avowedly "revisionist" statements that correct the weaknesses and shortcomings of the genre, which in many cases were real enough. But True Grit is a compelling reminder of why it has long been so satisfying, and the pleasures it affords in its most classic iterations.

The story is simple enough. It opens in post-Reconstruction Arkansas, where 14-year old Mattie Ross has come to the city of Fort Smith to claim the body of her father, murdered by a hired hand named Tom Chaney. But Mattie is not content simply to resolve her father's affairs; she's determined to avenge the crime. So she hires a somewhat unscrupulous Federal Marshall named Rooster Cogburn to retrieve Chaney from Indian Territory because she believes Cogburn has the "grit" for he job. One complication takes the form of another marshal, a Texan named LaBeouf, who also wants Chaney. The two men agree to collaborate, only to encounter another complication: the implacable insistence by Mattie that she join them. And so it that a semi-comic odyssey begins, one in which we get our fair share of horses, guns, bad weather, snakes, and all the requisite elements that are the prerequisites for a successful Western.

Mattie Ross is one of the great creations of modern American literature. As Donna Tartt (herself the distinguished author of 1992 novel The Secret History -- why has that never been made into a movie?) points out in her incisive afterword in this edition of the novel, there's long been a tendency among cult fans of this novel to compare her to Huck Finn. But Mattie is a tougher and smarter kid than Huck was.
She's more solemn than Huck, but Portis is endlessly inventive in exploiting her solemnity for comic effect, even as he evokes the language and attitude of what in many ways is a lost world. Mattie narrates the story from the perspective of about a half-century later, occasionally making contemporary asides like this one:

Thank God for the Harrison narcotics law. Also the Volstead Act. I know Governor Smith is 'wet' but that is because of his race and religion and he is not personally accountable for that. I think his first loyalty to the country and not to 'the infallible Pope of Rome.' I am not afraid of Al Smith for a minute. He is a good Democrat and when he is elected I believe he will do he right thing if he is not bullied into an early grave as was done to Woodrow Wilson, the greatest Presbyterian gentleman of the age.

All the major characters in the novel are Southern, and Confederate in their sympathies. Cogburn was one of Quantrill's Raiders, the notorious outfit responsible for atrocities in the Lawrence Raid of 1863, though he himself seems to be a rogue with a heart of gold. Cogburn's past becomes a topic of heated discussion at one point, but Portis less interested in judging or defending these people than in capturing their attitudes as unselfconsciously as he can. As we see in their occasional interactions with African Americans or Indians, they are neither more or less racist than their contemporaries.

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although it did not happen every day," Mattie says in the opening line of the book. The magic of this novel is the way its compellingly strange language and narrator come to seem palpably real. It is the great achievement of True Grit that it evokes a moment in U.S. history in all its ordinary, extraordinary wonder.

True Western

 

True Grit as a post-revisionist Western

In terms of the frequency of its production, at least, the Golden Age for the film genre of the Western was the 1950s. Ever since, a variety of critics and filmmakers have hailed any number of movies as "revisionist." Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns of the sixties (featuring the emerging Clint Eastwood); Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969); Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970): all were seen, at the time and since, as convention-shattering, even as they repeatedly referenced Western mythology. The genre went into eclipse through the seventies and eighties, exceptions like The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Dances with Wolves (1990) notwithstanding. Eastwood himself kick-started the genre again with Unforgiven (1992), which won the Academy Award Best Picture -- and, of course, was hailed with the same term.

Revisionism is a term that's various and elastic; sometimes it refers to attitudes toward violence, toward Native Americans, or simply toward the narrative conventions of the western itself. Occasionally even "classic" western filmmakers like John Ford are considered their own revisionist, as when Ford followed a paradigmatic Western like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) with the valedictory Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Revisionism has come to mean everything, and thus nothing -- except perhaps a kind of condescension toward the past on the part of those who conflate "new" with "sophisticated" and "old" with "simplistic."

It is in this context that I very happily very happily viewed -- for what I hope will be the first of many screenings -- of Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit last weekend. The Coens, who are among the most productive and satisfying filmmakers now working, nabbed a Best Picture Oscar for their 2007 project No Country for Old Men, a movie which, notwithstanding its 20th century setting, is essentially a western. True Grit, located in Choctaw territory in in the late 1870s, qualifies as a Western by just about any definition.

And it's here I will say flatly that True Grit is a post-revisionist Western. Yes, it is a remake of the 1969 movie starring John Wayne in a role that won him an Oscar on what was largely considered a collective sense of sentiment on the part of Academy members. (Jeff Bridges has the role of Rooster Cogburn this time, and makes it seem wholly his, and wholly effortless, as he always does.) And yes, the protagonist happens to be a fourteen year-old girl (played with really true grit by Hailee Steinfeld in an Oscar worthy performance herself). But there's no obvious effort to subvert, reconfigure, allegorize or anything else here -- except tell a very good story about a daughter trying to avenge the death of her father within the conventions of a genre that includes big landscapes, exciting shootouts, and rough justice administered with minimal government involvement. And lots of horses.

Of course, there are all kinds of nods to modern sensibilities here, ranging from the greater sense of agency on the part of the female character to the wry sense of humor that is the Coens' trademark. But they feel no need to somehow place nuance and beauty outside the boundaries of genre. The good guys, notably Bridges and the Texas Ranger played by Matt Damon, have their limitations. The bad guys (notably Josh Brolin) have partially redeeming values, ranging from a sense of humor to the good sense to recognize a smart, tough girl when confronted by one. And the oddly formal, but compelling language of Charles Portis's 1968 novel is imported to give the movie a distinctive voice. But what True Grit does more than anything else is make a case for the Western as a viable mode of artistic communication in the 21st century. And it succeeds, in gorgeous, parched colors.

Good to know something still works in this country.

Shooting Star

The following excerpt is a first draft in an effort to write about the career of Clint Eastwood.  Feedback is welcome. --JC

I'm one of those people -- and I think I can safely extrapolate that there are, by a conservative estimate, tens of millions of us -- who grew up with Clint Eastwood in the background of our lives. I do want to emphasize background. While Eastwood has long enjoyed a durable fan base, he's also been a public figure that we've all known, whether we wanted to or not. To some degree, this is a simple matter of marketing muscle; with his movies regularly advertised in newspapers on on television, his presence has been unavoidable. To some degree, too, Eastwood's choice of roles have made him a kind of cultural shorthand for the perennially popular, if not universally admired, independent gunslinger. Finally, there's Eastwood's sheer longevity, a longevity that has now spanned generations. This was true even 35 years ago, as Eastwood himself slyly indicated in Breezy, a 1974 movie about a May-November romance which he directed but did not have a leading role. At one point, the unlikely couple goes on a date to see High Plains Drifter, a 1973 western starring none other than Clint Eastwood, and one of the few movies at the time that could plausibly bridge what was then a rather large generation gap.

After he knocking around Hollywood for a few years in the mid-1950s, when he appeared in a series of small movie roles, Eastwood first became famous as for his role as Rowdy Yates on the long-running television series Rawhide (1959-65), where he was a largely unremarkable heartthrob of the kind those of us over the age of 25 or so have seen come and go many, many times. Like a handful of such performers (Jodie Foster's childhood apprenticeship in the Disney film factory comes to mind), Eastwood used this relatively shallow, albeit high profile, gig as a personal laboratory.  In the mid-sixties, he used his summers off from Rawhide to go to Europe to make a string of cheap so-called "spaghetti westerns" for the Italian director Sergio Leone. These films, which were not widely seen in the United States until the end of the decade, were the first indication of wider ambition, though few observers at the time considered them more than cartoonish experiments. But Eastwood became a genuine pop culture phenomenon with the release of Dirty Harry (1971), the first of five films (the last was released in 1988) in which he played a strong, silent, and violent San Francisco policeman who practiced rough justice by his own lights. These films made Eastwood a rich and powerful man in Hollywood. He quietly leveraged that power, often extending it by continuing to make crowd-pleasing thrillers -- in 1995, years before his greatest commercial successes, film critic and biographer Richard Schickel estimated that Eastwood had generated $1.5 billion in profits to Warner Brothers, which released most of his movies -- by taking on more personal projects and beginning a second career as a director.

Indeed, for anyone born after 1985 or so, the terms "spaghetti western" or "Dirty Harry" constitute relatively arcane pop culture references -- recognized by some people in that demographic for sure, but hardly household words. And yet these people are no less likely to recognize Eastwood's name than their elders. With the 1992 release of Unforgiven, a movie in which he starred as well as produced and directed, and for which won an Academy Award for Best Picture, Eastwood began one of the most remarkable second leases on life in film history. This run, which included a second Best Picture Oscar for Million Dollar Baby (2004), cannot help but inspire awe (and perhaps a little hope) for anyone with a fear of aging. Eastwood gave a widely acclaimed performance as an irascible racist in Gran Torino in 2008, which he claimed would be his last acting performance. But this fall, at age 80, he will release Hereafter, the 32nd feature film he will have directed.

Over the course of the last half-century, there have been two main narratives in Eastwood's career. For the most part, they are successive and divergent, though not completely so. The first one might be summarized as "Clint Eastwood, action hero." Certainly, such a label would have made sense to the general public at large, whether they were fans or not. That this was never quite the whole story is something some people would have recognized -- Eastwood made a lousy musical, Paint Your Wagon, in 1969 -- even if it remained a useful form of shorthand (indeed, the critical and commercial failure of that film can plausibly be attributed to the degree to which he strayed from his core strength as an action hero).

Critical opinion, which was more important in the 1960s and 70s than it is today, was tepid at best. Eastwood's recent champions have perhaps exaggerated the breadth of the critical disdain he elicited; Vincent Canby of the New York Times considered Eastwood's performance in Paint Your Wagon "amiable," and characterized the movie as a whole as one "that can be enjoyed more than simply tolerated."[Guide,737] But there's no question that Eastwood had plenty of vitriol hurled in his direction, most prominently by Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, whose contempt borders on shocking. "Clint Eastwood isn't offensive; he isn't an actor, so one can't call him offensive," Kael said of the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force, in 1974. "He'd have to do something before we could consider him bad at it." Besides objecting to what she considered Eastwood's wooden acting style (a self-conscious minimalism that has aged well in terms of critical opinion), Kael hated what she considered the moral indifference she saw running through all of Eastwood's work, an indifference that she considered symptomatic of Hollywood movies of the time. "At an action film now, it just doesn't make much difference whether a good or bad guy dies, or a radiant young girl or a double dealing chippie," she wrote. Kael made a distinction between the kind of cold-blooded violence she saw in Eastwood's work and the no less graphic realism in the films of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, whose work she lionized. Yet many subsequent observers have questioned the legitimacy of assertion. [PK, "Killing Time," 1/14/74, p.83)

Beginning in the 1980s, however, a gradual wave of revisionism began to build in Eastwood's favor. A new narrative, which might be termed "Clint Eastwood, major artist," took shape. The Museum of Modern Art hosted a one-day retrospective of his work in 1980, and some feminists began taking note of the strong female figures in some of his movies (often played by his paramour of the time, Sandra Locke). I myself distinctly remember with surprise that Eastwood directed Bird, a biopic of jazz legend Charlie Parker, in 1988, and took note of the respectful reviews the film generated (not that it led to to go see it, as I was neither a big jazz nor a big Eastwood fan). The turning point for me, as indeed it was for a great many people, was Unforgiven, which I finally went to go see at the end of 1992, months after its release, because the buzz around it was simply too great to ignore. Unforgiven was widely considered a "revisionist" western, a term that probably gets bandied about too much. The first of Eastwood's spaghetti westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), was also considered revisionist. But the term means pretty much diametrically opposing things in the two films. Fistful was revisionist in its relative amorality, and willingness to depict violence with greater frequency and ferocity than mainstream Hollywood far like The Magnificent Seven (1960), which was beautiful, clean, and unconsciously racist (not that Fistful was any better in its representation of Mexicans). Unforgiven, by contrast, ruthlessly undercut traditional notions of western heroism, and depicted the often excruciating messiness and moral ambiguity in the deaths of its characters. It's a movie that seems to directly address, and incorporate Kael's criticism. Eastwood has called Unforgiven his last western, and it does seem to be a summary statement.

Indeed, while the first storyline of "Clint Eastwood, action hero" continued to linger in the popular imagination long after critical opinion began to shift, many of those who adopted the "Clint Eastwood, major artist" narrative believed that Eastwood had shifted from one to the other. Sometimes this shift was understood in political terms. Both in the tough stance on urban crime that marks the Dirty Harry movies, and in Eastwood's avowed Republicanism -- he voted for Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon twice -- he was considered the property of the Right. Yet by the 1990s, Eastwood was attacked by conservative critics for his portrayal of an ineffective sheriff in A Perfect World (1993) and a sympathetic stance toward euthanasia in Million Dollar Baby nine years later. Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) and Gran Torino are downright multicultural in their attempt to represent an Asian point of view. And, notwithstanding Spike Lee's criticism for the lack of black characters in Eastwood's movie about the Battle of Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers (2006), any fair reading of Eastwood's career would have to acknowledge bona fide diversity in his treatment of African American characters as an actor and director, particularly in the string of films that runs from Bird to Invictus (2009).

Actually, this perceived notion of a change is initially what attracted me to Clint Eastwood. I sensed a trajectory there that I could trace, an implicit story I could make explicit by charting the way American history was narrated in his movies. And there is change, most obviously in the distinction between his first westerns and his last one, as I've noted, as well as an evolution in his characters' stance on gender, for example. But after an immersion in his body of work, the thing I find surprising is the strong degree of continuity in his historical vision, not the degree of change. From beginning to end, both in terms of the order in which he made his movies and the chronology in which their settings can be arranged, a strong sense of rugged individualism runs through Eastwood's work. In and of itself, that's hardly surprising or even all that interesting, given the centrality of this trope in the western tradition. That centrality was always contested: You always had your Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart to go along with your John Wayne. But the ambivalence about that individualism, that nagging persistence, even need, for social connection and social order: that's not something people tend to associate, much less profess to want, from a Clint Eastwood movie.

Indeed, if I was making this assertion in the last quarter of the 20th century instead of the first quarter of the 21st, it might well seem myopic: a serious reader would not deny the observations I plan to make so much as think that I'm overlooking the context of, say, the Dirty Harry movies, in which Eastwood's Nixonian hardhat anti-authoritarianism was far more obvious that what would seem to be gestures at best toward institutional loyalty. But in retrospect, Eastwood's characters come off more strongly than they did at the time as team players. Kael's complaints notwithstanding, they seem literally and figuratively more human than successors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the moral indifference about violence she criticized at the time seems downright mild when compared with movies like those of Quentin Tarantino. Part of the reason why, of course, is that the political climate of the nation as a whole moved a good deal further to the Right than it already perceptibly had at the moment Eastwood emerged as a movie star. In the end, I do think Eastwood's success is a reflection of the truth that the essence of his art is conservative, and as such reflected the spirit of his age. The question is what kind of conservative. The answer, I think is best apprehended through the lens of history.

Next: Eastwood as a child of the 1930 with a not-quite Baby Boomer sensibility

Happy Birthday to AHN

This week marks the first anniversary of this blog. To commemorate it, I'm running my first blog post of February 4, 2009. I'm very grateful for the hundreds of visits American History Now has received each week since its launch, and hope it will have many more. Thanks for coming!

--Jim Cullen

Outlaw Pete:
Springsteen Makes a Western

Among the many virtues in Bruce Springsteen’s music is a rich sense of history. And like many of those virtues, that sense of history has emerged organically over the course of his career. Springsteen’s first albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, were marked by a powerful sense of immediacy; to a great extent, they’re records of the present tense. Beginning with the release of Born to Run, a consciousness of history – principally in the form of a growing awareness of past failure, and a desperate desire to avoid similar mistakes – begins to suffuse the consciousness of his characters. This consciousness is deeply personal, typically expressed, for example, in generational tensions between fathers and sons. That’s what I mean by “organic.”

By about 1980, Springsteen’s sense of history begins to get broader. It emerges in a series of forms, ranging from his decision to perform songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (reading 1980 Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie as the suggestion of his manager, Jon Landau, seems to have been a watershed experience) to recording original songs like “Wreck on the Highway,” avowedly patterned on the style of country & western singer Roy Acuff. His 1982 album Nebraska is saturated with a sense of the 1930s (his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad even more so), and even deeply personal songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” connect the private struggles of their protagonist to much larger historical ones. This trajectory is a striking, and impressive testament to an artist’s power to grow and integrate everyday life into a broader human drama.

One of the less remarked upon aspects of Springsteen’s body of work is his fascination with the West. This is, of course, counterintuitive – Springsteen is nothing if not the voice of New Jersey, an embodiment of urban, ethnic, working-class values and culture typically associated with the Northeast Corridor. But the western signposts are there, as early as “Rosalita,” which climaxes with a vision of triumphant lovers savoring their victory over paternal repression in a café near San Diego. That’s a fleeting reference. But beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town – think of the “rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert” of “The Promised Land” – the West becomes a vivid and indispensable setting for a number of songs. Springsteen being Springsteen, he’s not always content simply to invoke or use such settings in conventional ways. So, for example, the gorgeous yearning that marks his 1995 song “Across the Border,” redolent with music, instrumentation, and language of the Southwest, is purposely ambiguous which side of the border its protagonists long to go. Springsteen’s mythic tendencies are often marked by creative friction with the concrete details and ironic realities of everyday life.

“Outlaw Pete,” the leadoff track on Springsteen’s latest album, Working on a Dream, represents the next turn of the wheel in a way that’s somehow predictable, surprising, and inevitable all at once. Superficially, the song, like the album as a whole, is something of a throwback, a return to the dense, lush, melodic pop songs that were once Springsteen’s stock-in-trade. At eight minutes long, it’s also the first time in decades that’s he’s recorded a mini-epic on the scale of “Incident on 57th St.” or “Jungleland.” For thirty years now, the overall trend in Springsteen’s work has been toward more sparse, even minimalist songs that approach spoken-language records, though the approach here was first broached on Magic in 2007.

It’s almost jarring to hear his eager embrace of melodic hooks and multi-track harmonies. It’s also almost jarring in that “Outlaw Pete” so willfully introduces us to a protagonist who seems like a cartoon figure from an imitation John Ford movie, who “at six months old” had “done three months in jail” and “robbed a bank in his diapers and little baby feet.” Pete’s signature question, “Can you hear me?” seems like a childish insistence for attention. Some might be amused by such a description; others might dismayed, even irritated by its triviality. One could be forgiven for perceiving that Springsteen is slipping into superficiality in his advancing age, perhaps trying to recapture the sense of popular appeal that once seems so effortlessly his.

But appearances are deceiving. More specifically, our perception of Outlaw Pete is deceiving. After hearing the seemingly requisite description of a horse-stealing, heart-breaking scoundrel – rendered in an amused voice that suggests the narrator views him as a figure closer to a rakishly charming Jesse James than a hard, frightening, Liberty Valance – the story turns on a dime (the music, which shifts to a declining phrase of repeating notes, indicates this) as Pete gets a vision of his own death that prompts him to marry a Navajo and settle down with a newborn daughter on a reservation. Yet in some sense the story is only getting started. A vindictive lawman – another staple of western mythology – is determined to bring Pete down and precipitates a confrontation. “Pete you think you have changed but you have not,” Dan tells him, in so doing posing the existential question at the heart of the song, which is to what degree we have agency over our characters and thus our fate. In the showdown that follows Pete is nominally the victor, yet Dan literally gets the last word in observing before his death that “we cannot undo these things that we’ve done.” The question “Can you hear me?” is turned on its head, as Dan speaks to Pete instead of Pete speaking to the world.

Pete, now a fugitive from the law, makes an ambiguous disappearance from the story. Is it to be understood that his encounter with Dan demonstrates the fixed nature of his personality and the impossibility of any lasting mortal redemption? Or is it an act of abnegation that protects his wife and daughter from the wickedness that surrounds him? The final verses of the song depict Dan’s daughter braiding Pete’s buckskin chaps in her hair – original sin and grace at once – with the question “Can you hear me?” now completely reversed, as we listeners seek the vanished Pete. Like Alan Ladd in Shane or John Wayne in any number of westerns, Pete catalyzes action that leads to resolution, but pushes him beyond the frame.

Like a great many works of art, “Outlaw Pete” asks many more questions than it answers. But there are at least two things it does clarify. The first is the ongoing vitality of western mythology (now nicely updated with a multicultural accent) as a vehicle for exploring the complexities of American life. The second is the ongoing vitality of Springsteen himself, 37 years into an enormously broad and deep body of work, to reinvent himself through reviewing and revising our cultural traditions. He hears us, and we see ourselves.

Western Air

Or why George Clooney is really John Wayne -- and why Up in the Air suggests a collective lack of political imagination

The locus of its settings may be American Airline terminals and Hilton hotels, but make no mistake: Up in the Air is a Western, and George Clooney is John Wayne (or, given his looks, maybe Alan Ladd in Shane). Like the quintessential Western hero, Clooney's Ryan Bingham is a loner who -- at the outset at least -- is content that way. Paradoxically, the very sense of mastery he exhibits as he enters a new environment marks him as an outsider. He's a hired gun for a private company that terminates employees on behalf of clients too timid to pull the trigger themselves: Bingham comes to town and fires at close range. And yet he's got an undeniable, if perverse, sense of charm. Indeed, like many a Western hero, we find ourselves rooting for him, even as we recognize that he is operating outside any conventional sense of law or even justice.

Naturally, there are complications. Some of those complications are female, and take the form of challenges to the hero's sense of moral order, an order which we may initially think he lacks but which becomes clear to us as the story proceeds. (Part of what makes this movie a modern western in the way in which the females act against, and are not simply subject to, that moral order -- and as such are potential villains as well as victims.) Bingham learns that his boss has hired a hot young maverick who wants the company to cut its travel budget and instead conduct firings by video from the company's home office in Omaha. Bingham makes compelling objections to this approach, which results in him reluctantly taking on the role as mentor for an upstart he regards with distaste. Which makes sense, since surrogate fathers are staples of Westerns.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot here except to say that in the broadest sense this is a movie that begins with a protagonist who chooses a life because it represents the fullest sense of freedom as he understands it (here connoted by the metaphor of the empty backpack) yet finds unexpectedly finds himself in that life out of a sense of necessity, and even duty. Bingham returns to his childhood home in northern Wisconsin -- one of the striking aspects of Up in the Air is that for all the screen time occupied by national franchises, it has a remarkably rooted sense of place in the Midwest -- and as it turns out, he has a redemptive role to play there. But as happy as he is go home, it's utterly evident that while he may be in that world, he's long since ceased to be of it. And can't be.

It's often the case that the movies that make the deepest impact on us are those that have an unexpected inevitability -- endings that we didn't see coming but which make perfect sense as we see them in retrospect. Up in the Air had that quality for me. But I found myself coming out of the movie disturbed by the surprising potency of the film's conservatism, something I didn't quite, but perhaps should have, expected from writer/director Jason Reitman, who preserved so much of the cheekiness of his source material in his film versions of Christopher Buckley's 1994 novel Thank You for Smoking (2005) and Diablo Cody's screenplay for Juno (2007). Like those movies, Up in the Air, based on Walter Kirn's 2002 novel, has a light comic touch, and a satiric stance toward those who who take abstractions of any kind too seriously. All of Reitman's movies show us protagonists whose libertarian instincts get reined in. But they all also betray a strong sense of skepticism about liberal solutions, whether government regulation (Thank You for Smoking) or abortion (Juno). Reitman's vision, while undeniably appealing in its earthy realism, also implicitly accepts, if not endorses, the status quo. Which is what most Westerns do. To put it more plainly: this is not a movie in which political solutions, collective action, or even seeing seeing the chief beneficiaries of others' misery get their comeuppance ever gets discussed, much less depicted.

It's not hard to see why: such an approach would strike most audiences as stilted, preachy, unrealistic. But if we really want to understand why it is that banks get bailed out and corporate executives get obscene bonuses while ordinary people lose their jobs and their homes, this movie points toward an answer. We seem to have a difficult time imagining a plausible alternative. As long as that's true, the only balm we're likely to get for our wounds is the illusion of George Clooney jetting into our lives to spend a few hours with us over the weekend before he takes off into the sunset.

Note: This blog post owes much to the durable influence of film scholar Robert Ray's "Thematic Paradigm," and his argument that many American films are in effect "disguised Westerns." See A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton University Press, 1985).

"Outlaw Pete": Springsteen Makes a Western

Among the many virtues in Bruce Springsteen’s music is a rich sense of history. And like many of those virtues, that sense of history has emerged organically over the course of his career. Springsteen’s first albums, Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, were marked by a powerful sense of immediacy; to a great extent, they’re records of the present tense. Beginning with the release of Born to Run, a consciousness of history – principally in the form of a growing awareness of past failure, and a desperate desire to avoid similar mistakes – begins to suffuse the consciousness of his characters. This consciousness is deeply personal, typically expressed, for example, in generational tensions between fathers and sons. That’s what I mean by “organic.”

By about 1980, Springsteen’s sense of history begins to get broader. It emerges in a series of forms, ranging from his decision to perform songs like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (reading 1980 Joe Klein’s biography of Guthrie as the suggestion of his manager, Jon Landau, seems to have been a watershed experience) to recording original songs like “Wreck on the Highway,” avowedly patterned on the style of country & western singer Roy Acuff. His 1982 album Nebraska is saturated with a sense of the 1930s (his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad even more so), and even deeply personal songs like “Born in the U.S.A.” connect the private struggles of their protagonist to much larger historical ones. This trajectory is a striking, and impressive testament to an artist’s power to grow and integrate everyday life into a broader human drama.

One of the less remarked upon aspects of Springsteen’s body of work is his fascination with the West. This is, of course, counterintuitive – Springsteen is nothing if not the voice of New Jersey, an embodiment of urban, ethnic, working-class values and culture typically associated with the Northeast Corridor. But the western signposts are there, as early as “Rosalita,” which climaxes with a vision of triumphant lovers savoring their victory over paternal repression in a café near San Diego. That’s a fleeting reference. But beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town – think of the “rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert” of “The Promised Land” – the West becomes a vivid and indispensable setting for a number of songs. Springsteen being Springsteen, he’s not always content simply to invoke or use such settings in conventional ways. So, for example, the gorgeous yearning that marks his 1995 song “Across the Border,” redolent with music, instrumentation, and language of the Southwest, is purposely ambiguous which side of the border its protagonists long to go. Springsteen’s mythic tendencies are often marked by creative friction with the concrete details and ironic realities of everyday life.

“Outlaw Pete,” the leadoff track on Springsteen’s new album, Working on a Dream, represents the next turn of the wheel in a way that’s somehow predictable, surprising, and inevitable all at once. Superficially, the song, like the album as a whole, is something of a throwback, a return to the dense, lush, melodic pop songs that were once Springsteen’s stock-in-trade. At eight minutes long, it’s also the first time in decades that’s he’s recorded a mini-epic on the scale of “Incident on 57th St.” or “Jungleland.” For thirty years now, the overall trend in Springsteen’s work has been toward more sparse, even minimalist songs that approach spoken-language records, though the approach here was first broached on Magic in 2007. It’s almost jarring to hear his eager embrace of melodic hooks and multi-track harmonies.

It’s also almost jarring in that “Outlaw Pete” so willfully introduces us to a protagonist who seems like a cartoon figure from an imitation John Ford movie, who “at six months old” had “done three months in jail” and “robbed a bank in his diapers and little baby feet.” Pete’s signature question, “Can you hear me?” seems like a childish insistence for attention. Some might be amused by such a description; others might dismayed, even irritated by its triviality. One could be forgiven for perceiving that Springsteen is slipping into superficiality in his advancing age, perhaps trying to recapture the sense of popular appeal that once seems so effortlessly his.

But appearances are deceiving. More specifically, our perception of Outlaw Pete is deceiving. After hearing the seemingly requisite description of a horse-stealing, heart-breaking scoundrel – rendered in an amused voice that suggests the narrator views him as a figure closer to a rakishly charming Jesse James than a hard, frightening, Liberty Valance – the story turns on a dime (the music, which shifts to a declining phrase of repeating notes, indicates this) as Pete gets a vision of his own death that prompts him to marry a Navajo and settle down with a newborn daughter on a reservation. Yet in some sense the story is only getting started. A vindictive lawman – another staple of western mythology – is determined to bring Pete down and precipitates a confrontation. “Pete you think you have changed but you have not,” Dan tells him, in so doing posing the existential question at the heart of the song, which is to what degree we have agency over our characters and thus our fate. In the showdown that follows Pete is nominally the victor, yet Dan literally gets the last word in observing before his death that “we cannot undo these things that we’ve done.” The question “Can you hear me?” is turned on its head, as Dan speaks to Pete instead of Pete speaking to the world.

Pete, now a fugitive from the law, makes an ambiguous disappearance from the story. Is it to be understood that his encounter with Dan demonstrates the fixed nature of his personality and the impossibility of any lasting mortal redemption? Or is it an act of abnegation that protects his wife and daughter from the wickedness that surrounds him? The final verses of the song depict Dan’s daughter braiding Pete’s buckskin chaps in her hair – original sin and grace at once – with the question “Can you hear me?” now completely reversed, as we listeners seek the vanished Pete. Like Alan Ladd in Shane or John Wayne in any number of westerns, Pete catalyzes action that leads to resolution, but pushes him beyond the frame.

Like a great many works of art, “Outlaw Pete” asks many more questions than it answers. But there are at least two things it does clarify. The first is the ongoing vitality of western mythology (now nicely updated with a multicultural accent) as a vehicle for exploring the complexities of American life. The second is the ongoing vitality of Springsteen himself, 36 years into an enormously broad and deep body of work, to reinvent himself through reviewing and revising our cultural traditions. He hears us, and we see ourselves.