Of Powerful Dogs and Fractured Frontiers

17 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies

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Film, Frontier, Jane Campion, Movies, Old West, Sexuality, The Frontier Thesis, The Power of the Dog, Westerns

(A bit cryptic, but still kinda spoilery)

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The frontier has always been a story of progress…

Pardon me!

‘progress’

Turner’s old “meeting place between savagery and civilization” isn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game; it is virtually always understood to be a transitory phase, an early chapter in the story of progress. For those that count as people in such stories, the frontier is a challenge to be met and a potential which must be brought to fruition. The story of the frontier will end when the savagery recedes, replaced once and for all with the civilization. The frontier is full of dangerous animals, untamed rivers, and wild Indians, but it bends towards a time when the only wolves and the bears left will be in the zoos, safe crossings will have been forged upon every river, and the Indians have all been placed on reservations, their children hauled off to be white-washed in the boarding schools. The frontier isn’t supposed to last. It is supposed to end. It is supposed to end in civilization.

But what if the frontier doesn’t want to end?

What if the agents of that frontier do not fade into America’s past, to become mere fables of a bygone era? What if those agents do not walk calmly back out and into the wilderness at the end of the movie, as John Wayne does at the end of The Searchers, knowing as his character did, that he character didn’t belong safe inside a well kept home. What if one of those agents insist on sticking around to crash the dinner parties of the civilized world? Worse yet, what if they want to teach the youth about the ways of the wilderness?

This, I gather, is the central question of “The Power of the Dog.”

One might, of course, be inclined to put another question ahead of this one, a question about the sexuality of men who live much of their lives so far from the company of women, but of course this too is a question about what people do well beyond the reach of ordinary virtue and what happens when someone from that world brings their wild ways back into the world of ordinary virtues.

Folks may have grown accustomed to thinking of cowboys as the manliest of men, but there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether that means what we might imagine it does within our safe and civilized – and very hetero-normative – world. It’s damned uncomfortable question; what are those cowboy’s doing out there? The last major movie to ask that question broke a mountain. This one crashes our dinner party.

And then it wants to spend time with our son!

It might seem incongruous, the possibility that the cowboyest of cowboys in this story could be so, so very not like we imagine cowboys to be, but this too just makes the central villain of the story that much more of a threat to the civilization we might have thought he helped to create. He didn’t vanish with the frontier, and he welcome the changes of the civilization he helped to create. The man doesn’t smell right. He doesn’t talk right. Maybe, he doesn’t even fuck right!

What the Hell is to be done about him?

Yeah, you’ll just have to watch the movie to find out.

Hostiles and Spoilers: A Magic Studi

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies, Native American Themes

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Christian Bale, Hostiles, Magic Negro, Movies, Old West, Rosemund Pike, Violence, Wes Studi, Western

Hostiles It’s good to be young and beautiful.

If you can’t be both, then you should probably be beautiful. If you are a character in a tragic story-line, it also helps to be white.

That’s all I can think of as I watch the final scene of Hostiles. It was a dark and bloody movie, and it certainly had its moments, but in the end it was our beautiful male and female leads, both white, who made it through the carnage. Oh yes, there was one Cheyenne child who survived the ordeal, but he was hardly a full character. We don’t really get to know him. His hopes and dreams are hardly present in the story-line, not those of the many characters native and white who never made it to ride off into a better life at the end of the film, not those of the two lead actors who accompany him. He is present at the end of the story, but largely as a symbol of something about them. The story is about our two beautiful white survivors.

It always was about them.

Hostiles begins with a Comanche raid on a remote homestead somewhere in the west. Rosalee Quaid (played by Rosemund Pike) survives the raid by hiding in a rock outcropping after seeing her husband killed & scalped and all three of her children shot. In the next scene, Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) captures a small group of Apache and drags them in chains to fort in New Mexico which will serve as their prison for the immediate future. It is quickly established that Blocker has done far worse than this in his days fighting Indians out west. He’s seen worse, and he’s done worse, and we’ve seen just enough of his own cruelty to believe it. The message is pretty clear from the get-go the frontier is brutal. Both native and non-native alike are engaged in terrible acts of violence and suffering abounds.

It is 1892, just a couple years after Wounded Knee, and we are looking the tail end of the frontier in American history. The characters filling this story are fully immersed in the bloodshed. That bloodshed has left Blocker and the soldiers with him lacking a bit of humanity and full of hatred. Rosalee Quaid is for the moment left out in the wilderness to suffer alone with the bodies of her dead family. This a world without much in the way of redeeming qualities.

It turns out that Blocker will soon be retiring from military service. The major plot takes shape when he is given one final assignment. He must escort Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), a Cheyenne war chief, to the man’s home in Montana. Blocker objects to this. Yellow Hawk is an old enemy. Yellow Hawk has personally killed a number of Blocker’s friends, and so he wants no part of any plan to help the man regain his freedom, but Yellow Hawk is dying. With the aid of Indian reformers, he has obtained an order from President Harrison authorizing his own release along with a military escort home. Whether he likes it or not, Blocker must take Yellow Hawk and his family to Montana.

The story-line that follows is every bit as violent as the opening sequence. Blocker would rather kill Yellow Hawk than help him (in fact he tries). They find Quaid of course. Her suffering provides Blocker with a chance to prove he still has a human side, albeit one reserved at the moment for some people and not others. The whole lot of them are pursued by the same Comanche that’d killed Quaid’s entire family. Blocker and his troops struggle to fight them off with the help of Yellow Hawk and his son (played by Adam Beach), both of whom are still in chains in this opening exchange. In time, Blocker is convinced to remove their chains, and shortly after they come to find the remaining members of the same Comanche raiding party have been killed in the night. Blocker is both relieved and embarrassed. Soon after, he and his Indian wards find themselves fighting fur traders who have kidnapped the women. An additional battle or two with an imprisoned soldier rounds out most of the fighting. They arrive in Montana just in time for Yellow Hawk to die peacefully in his homeland.

…but not before he and Blocker become friends.

When a local rancher objects to Yellow Hawk’s burial on his own property, the resulting battle leaves everyone dead but Blocker, Quaid, and one young Cheyenne boy, all of which leads us to that final scene.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot that this movie gets right. Their use of Cheyenne is particularly well done, and the characters are both vivid and interesting. The grimness of the whole story-line would normally be a strong selling point for me. Hell, it was. I liked that part of this movie.

What I didn’t like was the convenience of the story. The magic negro can as easily be just about any other magic minority, and Yellow Hawk fits that role perfectly. He has lived through the same violent period of American history that Blocker has, and he has committed atrocities just as Blocker has. He has even spent much of his recent life in prison. Yet he lacks the bitterness of Blocker and the rest of the soldiers. Yellow Hawk’s wisdom is a stabilizing force throughout the film. Studi is brilliant, as usual, and so the performance isn’t as over-the-top as many who have played such roles. Still, you can’t help but notice this is another story in which a minority with great wisdom helps the central character, a white man, overcome his own demons and face the world.

…but only after this same minority-advisor has died.

Yellow Hawk isn’t in possession of magical powers, which is a staple of the Magic minority character. Or is he? We never do learn how he and his son managed to kill the Comanche raiders, and it didn’t likely actually involve magical powers. Still, the action is inexplicable in terms of the plot line. Nobody else could have done it, and we never do see it as anything but an accomplished fact. It’s not a supernatural event, but it might as well have been.

And then of course, there is Yellow Hawk’s death, preceded of course by a conversation with Blocker, one in which Blocker finally achieves some peace, realizing that Yellow Hawk too has lost friends in the wars they have both fought. It’s a deeply moving scene. It’s also a very familiar scene. Once again, the death of a great and wise person of color leaves our wounded white protagonist with the strength and wisdom to put the rest of his life back together and move on.

And so the stories ends, as I began it here, with Quaid and Blocker and that one Cheyenne child at a train station. She will evidently raise him, a sort of replacement for her own lost children, and Blocker will go on to build a new life for himself, a life that might now be worth living, now that he has finally set aside the hatred he carried in the opening scenes. Even the child is safe now.

We should be happy.

I should be happy.

But I’m not.

Why is the child there anyway? He is there to confirm the healing of the two main white characters, both of whom now treat him with kindness despite enduring great loss at the hands of native peoples. He too accepts them, but his acceptance was never central to the plot. It was Quaid who could hardly be expected to endure the presence of Indians a few scenes into this film. It was Blocker that wanted to kill his Indian wards in the opening scenes. It is their ability to treat Indians well despite everything that we are supposed to find reassuring in the end.

This a very convenient reassurance, coming as it does at the price of so many other lives.

It would be easy to accept the victory we have been offered in Hostiles, easy to feel good because hearts have healed. The price of this healing was the lives of countless others, and in particular the life of the very Indians we are now reassured these two main characters no longer hate and fear. Every major native character was killed, and the only one we are left with is a child who will now be raised in the white world.

This really is a perfect symbol for the time of boarding schools and general allotment. Our heroes will go on to live in a world less violent, but a world less violent because many never made it into that world with them. The one ‘savage’ left alive at the conclusion of this story is no threat,of course, so what are we to make of the peace these adults make with him? They will go on to enjoy a well-earned peace, so we are shown, but what about him?

This child will no doubt survive.

But will the Indian?

Violent Memories and the Civil War Era in the Southwest

20 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Native American Themes, Politics

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Civil War, History, Kit Carson, Monuments, Navajo, Old West, Santa Fe, Southwest, War

It must have been a couple decades back. I was at a small party in Forth Defiance. Those attending included a number of officials in the Navajo tribal government. Fort Defiance serves as kind of a bedroom community for the capital of the Navajo Nation, so this was hardly unexpected. What none of us expected that evening was a quick lesson that began when our host asked if anyone knew the name of the main street going through the town? No-one did. As it happens, the name was Kit Carson Drive.

Kit Carson Apparently, it still is.

To say that most of the party-goers found this shocking is putting it mildly. It may not be obvious to some of my readers why a room full of Navajos would object to a street named after Kit Carson, but even the most cursory knowledge of their history would make this pretty well obvious. The man is popularly known as an old western Indian fighter, and as it happens, a good number of the Indians he fought were Navajo. When General James H. Carleton, the Army Commander for the Territory of New Mexico decided to go to war with the Navajo people, it was Colonel Kit Carson that he sent off to do it. Carson marched through Canyon de Chelly, the heart of Navajo territory, destroying resources (just as Sherman might have) and letting winter bring his enemies in to surrender. This campaign, and the four years of internment at Hwéeldi (Fort Sumner) still constitute the darkest chapter of most historical narratives about the Navajo people. So, you can just imagine what it must have meant for people who can still tell you about relatives lost on the long walk to Fort Sumner to learn that a road right through their community bears the name of the man responsible for their deaths.

Kinda put a damper on the party.

You might think it odd that folks didn’t know the name of the road to begin with, but it’s hardly unusual. Folks don’t pay that much attention to street names out that way. Many of the roads don’t have signs at all, and I don’t recall seeing that particular name on a street sign when I lived out there (though one can certainly be found in Fort Defiance today). This party was the only time anyone ever mentioned it to me.

The old south isn’t the only place in this country with a questionable sense of public history from the Civil War era. Those in the Southwest have less to do with the war between the states than the early stages of the Indian wars which would dominate the interior west for a couple decades. Kit Carson Drive is one of many such examples. The Obelisk in the town square of Santa Fe provides another. It’s had its own share of controversies over the years, not the least of them being this dedication:

20914595_10214035631069907_2575022190736341192_n “To the heroes who have fallen in various battles with savage Indians in the Territory of New Mexico.”

It should come as no surprise that this line acquired its share of critics over the years. It has had some defenders as well, to be sure, but plenty of critics. The sentiments might have seemed appropriate enough to those who erected it in 1868, but in the 1970s, sentiments had changed a bit, as had the political status of some of those ‘savage Indians’ referenced in the piece. So it really should have come as no surprise when calls went out for removal or modification of the monument. Today, at least, it may seem a little surprising to find the monument had Native American defenders, which apparently it did. Attempts were made to put the original wording into it’s proper context, so to speak, preserving it without appearing to endorse it, but some clearly weren’t satisfied with this way of thinking about the issue. Resolution apparently came in the form of a chisel, and the result is a monument with its own fill-in-the-blank question.

20992726_10214035596509043_4949865469052976294_n

It seems, the American public is hashing out a new round of debates over public monuments, particularly those in the South. Some no doubt find the entire debate quite trivial. Who reads the placards on a monument anyway? Of course when people fight over seemingly trivial things, you can bet your ass they aren’t really fighting over the trivial things. It isn’t actually history (much less historical monuments) that has people up in arms over Confederate Statues, just as it wasn’t really history that caused a word to fall off the monument in Santa Fe. Such battles are always about the present. They are about the way that people think and use history to shape the present, and there are usually some very specific present implications in these battles.

People typically see the present interests loud and clear when they confront advocates of social justice. If anyone ever forgets this, the term ‘political correctness’ is right there to remind us that someone (or at least someone on the left) has an agenda. What folks are slower to get, it seems, is the fact that these sorts of gestures are hardly neutral to begin with. There is a reason James W. Loewen devoted a fair portion of his book, Lies Across America, to Confederate monuments, and it wasn’t because these monuments contain sober and thoughtful commentary on the actual history of the region. A statue to a confederate hero isn’t just a reference to history as such; it says something to those who those whose ancestors those heroes fought to keep in bondage. And a monument to heroes who died fighting ‘savage Indians’ may say something noble to those descended from colonists (Spanish or Anglo) in the American southwest; it says something else to those descended from those very ‘savage Indians’.

To be sure, complications abound. Some folks may have ancestors on either end or neither of his memorial demographics, and some people may have no dog in the fight at all. Also ironic usage happens. Not every Native American takes umbrage at the word ‘savage’ just as not every Native American objects to the term ‘Redskins’. But we should be wary of efforts to make these exceptions into the rule. The Washington football team has, for, example paid good money trying to find, cultivate, and promote just about any Native American willing to help foster the notion that the team name reflects anything but a racist stereotype. Were the team name really so bland, one might almost wonder what use it would have for people interested in such a martial sport! And of course we now have the Cheetoh-in-Chief (who has his own bullshit civil war monument) mourning the loss of beautiful artwork and a desecration of history with every Confederate statue that goes down. His language is so flowery and positive. You’d almost think these monuments held no serious political significance in the present age.

Of course the folks delivering the Nazi salute in defense of Robert E. Lee might seem to argue otherwise.

There are people, times, and places who don’t find it necessary to remove or modify monuments to their sordid past. Some of these might not even be terrible people, places, or times. But if the monuments to an abusive past aren’t so toxic, this isn’t simply because potential critics choose to let it slide; it’s because the community as a whole has somehow managed to handle the issues in question. When the dominant voices prove tone-deaf or outright hostile to the interests of those on the wrong-side of monumental history, then we are all a lot less likely to get along. Then statues get pulled down.

…or someone just shows up with a chisel.

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Just a few pics of Canyon de Chelly (click to embiggen):