Where Have All of Papa’s Heroes Gone?
Here’s an overdue eulogy for the western hero I wrote in late summer of 2007. . .
How the West Was Lost
I got a chance to see 3:10 To Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford recently, and I left them both with my head swimming in a sea of nostalgia and confusion. What happened to our love for the Western Hero? Why do today’s audiences prefer superheroes and wizards and Wookies to that serape-wrapped, cigar-chewing gunslinger with the lethal squint?
There’s something about the western, and the Old West in general, that still captivates the little kid in all of us, I think – and ladies, that includes you. It’s about real unknowns, possibilities, and peril only a few generations removed from where we are now. It’s about uncharted horizons, the danger of being filled full of arrows and scalped by those through whose land we stole. There’s something about hardship and privation, and the testing of our collective mettles that makes us turn inward and ask if we, under those circumstances, would have had “the right stuff.”
But sometime after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid appeared in 1969, America abandoned the Western hero, in the same way that many contemporary African Americans reject the Bedraggled Bluesman as an embarrassing remnant of a past we’d rather forget. Or perhaps it was the rise of anti-heroes, those amoral characters portrayed as neither good nor bad, but compelling nonetheless. I’m talking about the Bonnies and Clydes, the Michael Corleones, Liza Minelli’s Sally Bowles from Cabaret, Jane Fonda’s hooker in Klute and dozens more, including Butch and Sundance themselves. The Old West of Gunsmoke and Bonanza were places where the bad guys and good guys were readily identifiable, or so we thought, until Dustin Hoffman sided with the Indians against Custer in Little Big Man. Cowboys have been playing catch-up ever since.
Every once in a while, there’s an anomaly like Silverado in the ‘80s, or Unforgiven and Dances With Wolves in the ‘90s that remind us of why we loved westerns in the first place. They take us well out of our world where we have such limited control over our lives, and put us in charge of everything except the elements.
In 3:10 to Yuma, Christian Bale plays a homesteader who’s lost part of his leg in the Civil War, and along with it the respect of his wife and teenaged son. To turn a much-needed fast buck, he joins a detail to squire a murderous outlaw (played with delicious malice by Russell Crowe) to the prison-bound train – the 3:10 To Yuma, Arizona. Their trip unfolds like the Messiah’s temptations in the wilderness – there’s an Indian ambush, and Crowe’s character offers an increasingly attractive series of bribes. Of course, Bale’s hero only becomes more resolute when the stakes are raised, and we admire that.
But don’t we also long for that kind of world, where we have decisive moments that test and reveal our own true nature? In most of our lives, there’s simply no opportunity for that kind of confrontation, unless you’re in law enforcement or serving in combat. When something goes wrong in our world, there’s no one standing 30 paces away on Main Street that we can stare down and demand satisfaction from. Instead, we’re caught in the gooey limbo of never finding the one responsible for our frustration. Instead, we’re lulled into giving up the chase after a few numbing minutes of Pressing One for English, Pressing Three if this is about an existing account, holding for the next available operator, and finally being patched through to someone we know is not responsible for putting a cactus needle in our backsides with their crappy service.
The Old West remains a tough sell to moviegoers largely because we regard it now as a minefield of political incorrectness. You’ll get no argument from anyone who’s ever seen an episode of Deadwood. Former slaves and slavers roamed the landscape. We were busy making and breaking treaties with Native Americans even as we systematically exterminated them, along with the buffalo. And a number of the folk heroes we revered were particularly unworthy of our adulation.
Consider Exhibit A: The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford. Here, Brad Pitt plays James the desperado, and it’s his best performance in years. His outlaw hero is a mood-swinging sociopath, but Casey Affleck plays Ford as a man captivated by James’ legend and the sway it holds over a world with so few celebrities. Ford regards Jesse in the same way perhaps that Booth viewed Lincoln, or Mark David Chapman came to fixate on John Lennon. If I kill Jesse, Ford reasons, I become him. Casey Affleck reveals Ford slowly, in a deadly game of distrust opposite Pitt’s Jesse James, and for a while, we wonder who’s going to kill who first, which is quite a feat since we know from history how it all turns out.
When it’s all said and done, the Assassination of Jesse James, like Brokeback Mountain, isn’t really a western at all. It’s a character study, and these characters, with their hidden motives unfulfilled desires, are much more like you and I today.
Me? I long for the cold steel of pearl handled six-guns at my fingertips and the chance to look my troubles in the eye before someone shouts, “Draw!”
