HORSE OPERA: THE MOVIE

Between the ages of nine and fourteen, I went to the movies every Saturday afternoon. It cost twelve cents. My friends and I were almost always first in line, and rushed to get the seats right under the light in the middle at the edge of the balcony. Yes, of course I missed some Saturdays; but not many.

We followed John Wayne follow the Marines across the Pacific, of course, and there was the occasional Tarzan -- Johnny Weismuller becoming ever more comfortably padded as he swung toward Jungle Jim. Lassie , the Disney films, and other "family features" were never on Saturday. You had to go Sunday and pay thirty cents for them.

Thirty odd times a year the Saturday afternoon feature was a Western. I liked Roy Rogers better than Gene Autry until one year we went to the Gene Autry Rodeo. Then I switched allegiances. Our sixguns shot caps. The best were the ones where the caps were six on a disc that you fit on the cylinder. Authenticity: you had to reload even more often than Gene and Roy did. We always counted.

The Roy or Gene Westerns were never my favorites, though. I liked what I would now call "B Westerns" best. As I look back and ask why, I realize that the answers I now give myself are a pack of lies, with some kernel of old truth thoroughly corrupted by interaction with a lifetime of intellectual and existential worms. Still, the fact is that I don't look back on the singing cowboys with any particular fondness and nostalgia, and I do look back at the B Westerns with affection. The images of Roy and Gene are static and stock. What's on the can is what's in the can; and the cans accumulated over the Saturdays are a Warhol surface. I certainly can't have thought that at the time.

The B Westerns felt different, in a way that got through even to a pre-teen. (Actually, other B films felt different too, hence the French discovery of film noir.) Behaviorally what that meant in those days was that it was no fun going back home and recreating the Roys and the Genes. The whites were too white, and the blacks too black, I think.

So, you ask, did the B Westerns influence you more than the films of the singing cowboys? And that gets us to the site of the subsequent discussion. For I want the answer to be "yes," and it may be "no." I want to be firm and decisive about being influenced by the movies of my childhood, and the nature of that influence is an obscure and tangled mess. My "thesis" is that the tangle is common to my whole generation, and that to understand us, the world we've had a part in building, our politics, our years of retirement, and so on, you're going to have to have a go at untangling the tangle. In what follows I'll try to help. We can start by pulling together what everybody knows.

The Voyage of the Hermenauts

It's no fun talking about films unless you interpret them: tell everybody what they really mean. Really? Well, tell people what they could mean, should mean, probably mean, can't mean, and so on. The rules for good conversation about films is that everybody has to do some interpreting -- even though everybody also strongly suspects that the conversation will never end in a reasoned agreement about what this or that really means. If you want to have a conversation with that kind of closure, talk about DNA sequences or something of the sort, or how far the moon is from the earth. Don't talk about what movies mean.

Nonetheless, go ahead and argue about what the movie really means. And be ready to hold your ground for a while. It's like the sixgun duets. Nobody really gets killed, and the drama is eternally satisfying. It's even more satisfying if you learn things from one another, so give everyone a chance. (Of course what I really mean (oops) is to give me a chance over the rest of the book.)

Everything I just said is true of literary works as well as movies, but movies can be more devilishly interesting in this regard than, say, novels. For instance, if we ask of a novel if the author understands what it really means, we needn't concede that he or she does. That is, the author needn't be the ultimate authority on meaning, for a lot of reasons we don't have to get too involved with here. On the other hand, since the novel is the author's creation, then he or she certainly needs to be listened to seriously. By this I mean that it's highly possible we could learn a lot about the meaning of a novel by listening to the author. If we couldn't, we'd be right to think that something weird was going on. Maybe a particularly tyrannical and ambitious editor had gotten between the author and us, for example. Obviously we wouldn't expect that the printers and jacket designers would have all that much of a chance to affect meaning, unless, of course, all we read of the book was the dust jacket.

Movies are very often a different kettle of fish. Just to begin with, you normally have an original author, a screenwriter, a director, a producer, a cinematographer, and an editor -- and maybe even several of each. Except for home movies, these are rarely all rolled into one person. But in film making, in contrast to novel making, every one of these creative roles can have an enormous impact on the meaning of the finished product. Because of this, and because of what are known as "non-linear interactions" between the creative components, it's entirely possible that a best (though probably not exclusive) interpretation of the film isn't one that any of the creators of the film would have even thought about. This is so obvious that some film makers who are most jealous of their own creation of meaning, fight tooth and nail to have control over every aspect of the film making process. The consequences are legendary, from D. W, Griffith, through Orson Welles, to the next young genius who takes Film Making 101 at USC.

It would be nice to think that all the folks mentioned in the credits "cooperated" in making the movie, and also in creating the meanings. Sometimes they do. Other times they just collaborate. In a world of volatile temperament, and the world of acting, producing and directing is certainly that, cooperation is often hard to come by. Take Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe, for example. Their difficulties with one another while making Some Like it Hot are legendary. Yet a decent majority of film fans think the picture is the best comedy ever made. The point is that except in unusual circumstances the movie making process is out of control to some extent. Contingencies, accidents, compromises, and Scotch tape end up having an impact on movie and meaning. In other words, movie making seems to be a lot like life. A lot of the time nobody is really responsible for a result, certainly not completely, nor for a lack of results. Yet even in those cases, an amazing number of times, the results are just terrific: again in movies just as in life. Of course what you or I do when something comes out really well (to our surprise) is quick make up a story about how that's what we meant all the time, and so on. Interviews with directors generally produce as much fiction as the film did. But to some extent I'm your interpretation of me, and you're partly my interpretation of you. We're necessary mirrors for one another, and if we didn't have mirrors we wouldn't know what we look like.

It's the same with us as "the viewing public," as they say. Put it this way. Under normal circumstances we have a creative role along with the people who made the film. For when we talk about a "movie" we're not just talking about the images and sounds in the film can or on the tape or DVD. We ourselves complete the existence of a movie, what it means, and so on by watching it, loving or hating it, talking about it, and, probably most important, dreaming about it. Citizen Kane , for example, is thoroughly welded to legend, by now. Or, to put it a better way, the movie has become the phenomenon of Citizen Kane , and we are among the legend makers. Another good example of this is the creation of Film Noir. As a genre, with each movie getting part of its continued meaning for being in the genre, it was created by a viewing public: Jean Luc Godard and his cohorts in France, who went on to make films of their own much influenced by the shadows, silhouettes, and sick minds they'd been watching. The people who had made the original movies were aware of some of what they were doing, but all those various awarenesses hadn't come together in the way they did for the French New Wave. A new way of appreciating the films, and a new way of consciously making films, was created by a particular (and particularly sensitive) viewing public. Double Indemnity, Detour, and all the rest were re-created -- and now their identities are the recreated ones.

In a similar way, there's a mini-genre created farther along in this book: the Taco Bell Western. Now it isn't going to be anything like as important a genre as Film Noir, or influence future film makers, but in its way, it too is meant to lead to a new appreciation. I think that at best that's what the game of interpretation does. And it doesn't matter a bit if everybody agrees at the end. In fact, it's a lot more fun if they don't. It's more fun still if the original film makers hadn't any conception of the possibility of such a genre, but in this case I think that some of them, maybe all of them, did have at least the inkling.

So that's my attitude toward interpretation. In some cases I know how this or that movie was understood at the time of its release because I was there watching it at the time. In other cases we'll have to work off of less immediate information. The point will always be synthetic: to bring some ideas, images, and points of view together with the hope that somebody will learn something useful from it. Eternal truths will appear only by accident.

Opera

About once a decade, somebody rediscovers why Westerns got to be called "horse operas" almost the minute they first appeared. Last decade the discoverer was Martin Scorsese, who, along with some other astute students of film history, noticed that Johnny Guitar was operatic. Well, after all, Scorsese's lineage …. A few decades earlier, in the same lineage, Puccini had noticed the operatic qualities of David Belasco's play Girl of the Golden West and made it into, um, well, an opera, La Fanciulla del Ovest . The Italian sense of the dramatic and the operatic turns out to be incredibly important and fruitful for the latter part of the history of the Western. The Spaghetti Western is an absolutely fascinating phenomenon. And Scorsese, as you'll see as we go along, is one of my culture heroes. But we have to remember that it didn't take Puccini or Scorsese to start calling Westerns horse operas.

The Westerns right from the beginning were so romantic. After all, the Westward expansion of the US had been romanticized ever since Daniel Boone, long before movies were invented. The thrill of the unknown and the beauty of "wild nature" had long been the stock in trade of pulp magazines, railroad advertising, land speculation, and, of course, wild west shows. The movie Westerns just picked up where previous culture had brought the consciousness not of only Americans, but of the whole world.

Then, of course, the silent films were romantic in themselves. The challenge for actors and actresses to portray emotion and narrative without the help of their voices produced a histrionic acting style that fed into all the other romantic excess. With no voices to sing the arias, faces had to sing them. Wringing hands filled in for ringing tonsils. "We had faces, then. We didn't need voices." Says Norma Desmond.

Then there are the horses. They're absolutely perfect for the romantic drama: big, fast exciting, and, to those who are inclined, beautiful. The Westerns share horses with the gazillions of racetrack films of operatic fervor. National Velvet is the obvious example, but there's virtually no end to them, when you think about it. If it's not Liz in the saddle it's Harpo. Velvet was very far from alone in her love for horses. That's why the film was so popular, after all. In fact, the attraction of equestrianism for women is nearly legendary. This meant that girls and young women were an available audience for Westerns, especially if they were made to feel more welcome than usual, as they were in the Roy Rogers/ Dale Evans partnership. For the pre-teen equestrienne, it didn't even matter much if the cowboy kissed his horse rather than his girlfriend. It might even show good taste. In a world where the studios were trying above all to build "box office," preferably a public with a life-long commitment to going to the movies, attracting young women was a serious concern. The Saturday afternoon Westerns made at least a token attempt by exploiting the love of horses.

In the end, though, the operatic character of the Westerns was established by the ritual stylizations. It's also true, of course, that some of the stylizations were a natural result of the operatic character of the Westerns. There's no end to the stylized rituals we could talk about. First among them has to be the sixgun duet. We'll look at a really good super-operatic one when we get to The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly , but for the moment let's just look at all the good stuff the sixgun duet embodies.

First there's very image of the isolated romantic hero whose fate is in nobody's hands but his own -- however he got himself into the duet in the first place. There he stands -- or slowly walks -- hands at the ready, eyes on that telltale move that he has come to know as the signal for him to reach for his gun. Nine times out of ten this is a duet between Good and Evil, Hero, and Villain. Villain must draw first, though the rules say this constitutes a fair chance for Good. The tension in the music rises. The silence sings. The hands move. The shots ring out. One or both fall.

Now, who in the world ever did that? We discussed the matter at length walking home up Pleasant Street in the late '40's, and decided early on that no one would ever really do that kind of thing. One of the reasons, I remember, came out after an afternoon on Tarawa or Guadacanal or maybe even Iwo Jima. If you were really serious about killing each other, we decided, you lobbed a grenade or snuck up with a flame thrower. You'd have to be crazy to walk down the middle of the street like that, trusting your life to a grab for your gun.

We didn't see many (if any) movies about knights in armor. Now, in retrospect, I'd have to say that sixgun duets were like jousting. When you think of it, you need all the understandings, rules, and attitudes of the days of chivalry to have a ritual like that work. We'll see later that Ford and Leone knew as much. But it sure makes for good opera.

The genre itself came to admit all that after a while. It's famous and well documented that John Wayne and Howard Hawkes were outraged at High Noon . Sheriff Kane throwing his badge into the dust was, to them, despicable, and his disgust with the townfolk foolish. So they made Rio Bravo (then El Dorado ) in protest. John T. Chance, the sheriff in Rio Bravo , knows better than to let amateurs get involved in serious fighting. They have wives and families, for one thing, and won't take the risks necessary to get the job done. Wheeler (Ward Bond) tries to help, and gets shot for the attempt. QED. It takes trained professionals to go up against the Burdettes of the world and their professionals. So much for the citizen militia. Where's the NRA when we need it?

We're obviously not in the land of plain fact here. Howard Hawkes and John Wayne can't prove that Fred Zimmerman and Gary Cooper were wrong by making a different movie. Everybody knows that. So what are those guys fighting about? The power of myth.

Mythic Space

Whatever else we are, we're story tellers. Movies are just one of the recent new ways of telling stories. In fact, the "media" for telling stories have expanded and proliferated incredibly in the last century. (But so has the population; so maybe the "stories per capita " is about the same as it's always been.) Story telling is so important to us that we live through stories, identify ourselves through stories, fight wars over stories. It really doesn't matter whether they're true or not. If we think they are, or want them to be, we call them religions, or patriotism, or historical destiny, or something, and kill for them. That's how important stories are to us.

Now, a lot of the films we'll be talking about were made around the time of WWII, when patriotism was no joke. Others were made at the time of the Cold War when patriotism was made into a joke but nobody was laughing. The movie industry had become so central to telling the patriotic story that it was subjected to rigorous discipline by the super-patriots -- McCarthy, HUAC, the young Nixon, and so on. Ironically, people who had made some of the most patriotic films during WWII were the ones blacklisted during the Cold War. Maybe it isn't so ironic. They made patriotic films because they were anti-fascists.

The requirements of our mythic space, here in the good old US of A, are very complex. We're a nation of immigrants and imports. Nearly every generation we've had to learn to live with new faces and new voices. To be honest about it, a lot of the time we don't get along with each other very well. Religious unity is one of the common sources of cohesion elsewhere, but it's absent with us. The religious stories are officially prohibited at the very same time we live under the sway of a generically Christian ethos. Cynics say we have nothing in common but greed. All this puts a tremendous burden on finding stories of unity.

One of the most common unity myths was built on the settling of the West. The shared life of wagons west could display people of disparate origins cooperating for the good of each and of all. Of course the bad news here is that for decades this story of cooperative pioneering had its impact at the expense of the "Indians," who were depicted as providing a large part of the problem to be overcome. Unity is most easily achieved in the face of a common enemy. So "cowboys and Indians" became a dominant myth, played out everywhere -- including my own neighborhood (where it was often more fun being one of the Indians). Notice that the days of cowboys and Indians were long past when the myth was invoked. Displacement in time and place will be a recurrent theme as we go along. It's absolutely characteristic of unity myths in tricky circumstances.

Then came Pearl Harbor. The Germans and the Japs replaced the Indians. Hollywood leapt into the creation and constant reinforcement of unity myths. Frank Capra, already the ranking creator of feel-good depictions of the middle class for morale building during the depression was chosen by the government to produce the Why we Fight documentaries. The Warner Brothers chose themselves to create sympathies for the Free French as they resisted the march west of the Nazis. John Wayne began his tour around and across the Pacific. In all these cases, the message of Americans of all origins joining hands for the fight was uppermost. The most striking symbol was the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, a cooperative task famously performed by an ethnically assorted crew.

So by the end of WWII, movies were established as the leading purveyors of "the myths we live by." As we all know, they were largely but not entirely supplanted by television, but notice that television is an alternative to the movies only in economic terms. That is, it redistributes the profits of film making while depending heavily on film making at the same time. We all know how Westerns filled prime time TV in their time as much as cop shows and "reality" shows do at the time I write this. The advent of cable TV was another profit re-distributor, but, again, with a heavy dependence on film making. Television of course provided far more extensive access to film than the movie theaters ever would have been able to do, and, as a by-product of their need to fill an enormous amount of air time, they were a powerful force behind the preservation of old movies. Then we enter the present age of videos and DVD's. Probably for a large majority of present-day movie lovers, access to the old Westerns we'll be exploring in later chapters is exclusively on the TV screen. On the one hand this is a shame in terms of the quality of the movie experience. Some of the power of the mythic images is lost on the small screen. On the other hand , many more people have easy access to the mythic world of the Western.

Nowhere/Thenthere in the World

The Big Lebowski opens with tumbleweed drifting to the strains of its eponymous tune right down to the beach at Malibu. Now that's the west.

But, of course, it isn't the west, no matter how the Coen brothers want to jerk us around. Then they rub our noses in it by dragging poor Sam Elliot off the range to provide the most clueless narrative in film history. Dudes are one thing in the bunkhouse and entirely another at the bowling alley. Those are two different worlds, and we recognize that fact immediately. William S. Hart's last significant film was Tumbleweeds ; he probably shot it fairly close to Malibu Beach, and that still don't make Malibu Beach the west, podner. In fact, in mythic space, hardly anyplace is farther from the west than Malibu Beach -- as the Coens well know.

Well, then, where is the west. The cynics will say "Monument Valley," and we'll certainly get there before long, but the right answer is that the west is nowhere and everywhere. But, just like Camelot, also nowhere and everywhere, the west isn't just anywhere in nowhere. It's precisely located in nowhere; and one digit in its zipcode is our imaginations. No one who makes a western film (if anyone ever does again) needs to tell us at any length where we are. That's the goofiness of Sam Elliot and the tumbleweed. We see them and know where we are immediately; but then find ourselves disoriented, like Elliot himself, and confused. Whoa, Dude.

When Sergio Leone wants to piss on all the trees (or cacti) at once, he calls the movie Once upon a Time in the West . We know that formula too. We're going to be somewhere in the land of the fairy tale. That's another fairly precise address in the nowhere, and the fun of the nowhere is that we can be at lots of addresses at the same time. With a long tradition of affording opportunities for escape and denial, movies are great at moving us around in those neighborhoods far from the pressures of reality. Nowadays Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings, and, come to think of it, the White House all pitch in to keep reality at bay. Westerns used to do the same.

However, there's the old Hollywood one liner, attributed to whatever producer you happen to be talking about at the time: "Movies are entertainment. If you want to send a message, call Western Union." Movies aren't supposed to have any serious content, and that goes for the westerns too. They're supposed to stay in the "once upon a time." Well, if you believe that, you'd better get in off the street, pilgrim. Westerns were always thick with messages. We'll see that over and over as we go along.

We'll also find that the address of the western in mythic space was well enough fixed so that it was a particularly excellent medium for messages. The message delivered to the Indians, over and over again, was immediately relayed to Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, for example. At the same time, it was delivered to the American public, who were taught over and over again how to regard their enemies and deal with them. The fact that the message was a generally welcome one -- for a long while -- doesn't make it any less a message. Hollywood was a good deal more efficient than Western Union would have been in getting the word around.

For the Europeans, of course, the mythic space of the American western was superimposed on underlying meanings very different from the ones most common in the US. In particular, when Cinecitta began to produce long strands of western tales, the framework of the western lent itself to messages quite different from those of the American westerns of the time, even when they had a superficially identical surface structure. We'll see that in the Taco Bell westerns of the '60's.

Another framework, to be compared with the western, is the epic. De Mille used the Bible the way a cocktail pianist uses a fake book: variations on a theme by Jehovah. This reminds us of the religious underpinnings of the American frameworks of meaning, and reminds us as well that these underpinnings were very important to the western. For example, the contention between the ranchers and the sod busters is, after all, the contention between Cain and Abel. Who is the more godly?

In fact, the mythic space of the western is a characteristically Puritan space. That's not surprising. Puritanism is the default drive of American morality: If everything isn't going right, find something to prohibit; high spirits are evil spirits and must be exorcised. In a later chapter we'll have the fun of seeing how that works in complex circumstances, but here while we're talking about mythic spaces is a good time to remind ourselves that the Puritan world is in the nowhere along with the rest of the myths. But don't think this is an inconvenience to those of puritan bent (are puritans ever bent?). The fact that the pure world is forever out of reach is one of the main sadistic pleasures of Puritanism, and the fundamental(as it were) part of its moral power.

For the film lover, the way to put one of the major consequences of this Puritanism is to make a comparison with the ethos of Ingmar Bergman. For Bergman, man searches for contact with his god in a lonely empty world of silence. The very vastness, majestic grandeur, and awesome loneliness of the world are the mark, as it were, of the presence of God. The isolation that then becomes the challenge to faith is the existential state of the Christian, and the conquering of the isolation the task of the pious Christian life. In other words, the Christian lives in Monument Valley. Pilgrim's Progress is the guidebook.

The true Western is always painted on a canvas whose edges are too far away to see. It might as well have no edges at all. The distances are so daunting, that we're obsessed by time. Will the cavalry get there in time? Sometimes it will, and sometimes it will arrive only in time to perform a requiem.

Someone flees, and someone else, the posse, say, pursues. The pursuit is endless: Valdez ( Valdez is Coming ); Butch and Sundance (who run out of west and have to go south); Moon ( Goin' South ) who runs out of bachelorhood. The list is also endless, with vast catalogue of ends. But before the end, the vastness of the space always leaves open the possibility of many ends. In that way the West is, of course, like the sea, where it was in the hands of the Captain and sailors.

And of course the most important distance is the distance to the new home. For European immigrants, the difference between the sea, the desert, and the lone prairie can't have been very great, and their meaning can't have been very different either. In retrospect, the sea may have been kinder, but, of course on the desert and the prairie your fate was closer to being in your own hands and those of your neighbor than it had been on the sea.

So, the variations on the theme of vast distance, loneliness, and isolation were the main stuff of the western, and once that canvas had been prepared for the story, the wagons and the cameras could roll.

Period

As I said at the beginning, these thoughts are generational. They're both from the generation that grew up around the time of WWII, and about that generation -- my generation: the generation for whom and by whom these classic Westerns we're looking at were made. My parents were fairly old, as new parents go, when I was born. It was the end of the depression -- or at least in their judgment it was near enough to the end of the depression to risk starting a family. It turned out to be very near the start of WWII as well, though that really hadn't dawned on most Americans. It was in this period that present day America was formed. Of course it was also the formative period for our most important national leaders of the moment.

But it's not only America that was formed in that period. The present international system was (re)formed then as well. For example, both Israel and the United Nations, as well as NATO, the Cold War, and the European Common Market had their beginnings during the period. Finally, it was also the period when the nations of Asia and Africa began the struggle for independence from European colonial rule. It wasn't the only key formative period in world history by a long shot, but it's the one whose consequences are in our face at the moment I write this.

Film was an incredibly important influence on the formation of our self conception during the period we'll be looking at, as it still is. To use an old image, to walk into the world of film of the forties and fifties is like walking into the mirror room at the fun house. Everything else in the world is reflected on the movie screen, but, as I said above, the reflections are coming from a lot of different minds and perspectives. So you have to look fairly carefully to see what's being reflected. That's what we'll try to do in the five essay that follow.

In Sunset Boulevard , a homage to romance and histrionics.

Sometimes getting there takes some real doing, as it does for Harmonica and Frank in Once upon a Time in the West. Harmonica's whole life has been a preparation for the moment, as Cheyenne in fact points out.

The legend of the lost tribe, the Fakawi, who wandered around the west announcing themselves: We're the Fakawi, We're the Fakawi.

The western is a perfect example of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have called a "structured structuring structure." What this means is that it constituted a familiar and convenient framework for a story whose basic meaning everyone would know, but would allow for explorations and subtle changes of that meaning. Then, after a while, the subtle changes in particular stories subtly changed the shape of the framework itself. Later we'll see that dynamic with the "cowboys and Indians," and with the railroad.

In a scholarly context, the point would be put in terms of Kierkegaard. But, then, the step from Kierkegaard to Bergman is so short that we lose nothing (or, we don't lose "nothing") by using Bergman as the benchmark.

No one ever knew this better than Gene Rodenberry, who right from the first made the exploration of space a sea voyage. " Steady as she goes."