Through the Post 9/11 Lens:
Reconfiguring Masculinity and
Identity in Neo Westerns.
Fig 1.1: Sidney Nolan. “Ned Kelly” 1946. National Gallery of Australia. Canberra Maurita Dumbill 11104287 Masters in Media Studies: Film Studies Dr Abraham Geil & Dr MarieAude BaronianContent
Introduction
2
Chapter One
8
Hero? Myth? Man
Chapter Two
23
Old lawman. New evil
Chapter Three
40
Triumph of the oilman?
Chapter Four
53
Bearman
Conclusion
72
List of figures
74
Bibliography
77
Introduction
The classical western is crucial to sustaining an American identity which is repeatedly under 1 attack. As the genre is dynamic, it is able to portray malleable ideals of masculinity and identity. Film historian Peter C. Rollins argues westerns have created “an American culture...almost unimaginable without the West as a touchstone of national identity.” Within this seemingly orthodox genre, the western 2 investigates crucial social issues at the crux of American society. Westerns have been used “as a means of making historical and cultural inferences about collective fantasies shared by large groups of people and of identifying differences in these fantasies from one culture or period to another.” Neo westerns 3 acknowledge the traditions and formations of the classical western but critique and update the conventions, nostalgia and traditions of the genre in a contemporary sphere. Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2 claims the neo western changed assumptions of nation building and identity configuration post World War II and to progress this notion, I believe neo westerns, post 9/11 criticise archetypal American values and thus become an emblem for “modern political cinema.” As such, at a time of national selfreflection, 4 the neo western can reflect upon the positive national mythologies embodied in the classic western; community, family, religion and openness. Del Jacobs claims that the neo western “keeps alive the basic elements and cliches of the traditional Western while still allowing them room for modification.” Neo 5 westerns certainly subvert and distort many of the typical codes which explicitly define the western genre.
1 I will use westerns in lowercase “w” throughout this thesis, citing Wallman’s view that the western as a genre “should be written in the lower case just as all other genres.” Wallman, Jeffrey. The Western: Parables of the American Dream. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press. Print. 1999. p13
2 Rollins, Peter C., Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television and History. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Print. 2005. p2
3 Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. University of California Press. Print. 2014. p7
4 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Print. 1989. p218
5 Jacobs, Del. Revisioning Film Traditions — The PseudoDocumentary and the NeoWestern. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Print. 2000. p 60.
Whereas classic westerns move from heroic action towards resolution, community and national identity,;
6
neo westerns evince a disjointed sense of peoples not already defined and labelled but still emerging and creating a sense of itself. Rather than assuming, as classic westerns do, that the past is knowable and 7 subjugated, the neo western questions America’s homogeneity, hegemony, mythic discourses and structured patriarchy. Unlike classic westerns, neo westerns do not assume that the past is knowable and subjugated. Instead they question America’s homogeneity, hegemony, mythic discourses and structured patriarchy. Hence, when the neo western restates or remembers tropes and styles established under antecedent forms of the classic western, it does so not to belabour their timelessness or essential significance to identity, masculinity and nation, but to readjust focus on them to evaluate and expose these assumptions. Perhaps the neo western can reflect upon the traditional concepts that the classic western has created whilst developing a new type of film which critically bisects those traditions in a transnational and mediated age.
Protective paternal masculinities are affiliated with the discourse of American national identity that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 and the resulting war on terror. Scholars have noted the emergence of the “icon of neomacho man” and other cultural attempts “to right the applecart of traditional gender roles.” Susan Faludi’s treatise on post 9/11 culture delineates how in times of turmoil, males are elevated8 to become protectors and as a result, feminist discourse is sidelined. As such, male orientated action comes to the fore of popular culture and thus, mediations of masculinity are complicit in a discursive conquest of feminism whilst perpetuating, recuperating and commemorating the discourses of involved fatherhood granted by postfeminism. Constructions of masculinity in western films often mirror gendered, racial and social conflicts of the period and consequently, “the role of the masculine protector puts those
6 Films in which adhere to the classic western genre typically display least three tropes. Firstly there is always a hero who displays morally good qualities. Secondly, each film has a villain who serves as an antagonist to the hero. Finally, each film follows a narrative between which good and evil are put to play, ultimately with the hero prevailing. overview of western literature. See Robert Stam and Ella Shohat: Unthinking eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media and Rick Altman: Film/Genre.
7 Colebrook, Claire. Understanding Deleuze. Crowns Nest: Allen and Unwin. Print. 2002. P 119 8 Melnick, Jeffrey. 9/11 Culture. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Print. 2011. p223
protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience.”
Iris Young also identified a congruent “logic of masculinist protection” in the intensified conservatism
9 10
of the Bush presidency’s gender ideology while Stephen J. Ducat points to a “cultural remasculinization” through “the revivification of “heroic” manhood” which brought in “a new era of defeminized men.” 11 However, conservative commentator Peggy Noonan proclaimed that “from the ashes of 9/11, arise the manly virtues which promoted a resurrection of the masculine ideal which prompted similar rallying cries.”12 In illustrating how ideas of masculinity in America were shaped by classic westerns, I will appraise the ways in which contemporary masculine concerns permeate and affect neo westerns.
I will utilise R.W. Connell’s theories on masculinity as they revolve around body reflexive practices, performed and produced maleness and have helped lay the groundwork for subsequent studies of gender. Connell is interested in masculinity in terms of performed and produced maleness and has commented on the western claiming that “exemplars of masculinity are men of the frontier.” She also 13 puts to use Michel Foucault’s theory in discussing hegemonic masculinity, whereby identities are socially constructed and nonessential; masculinity is socially constructed, it is therefore pliant. “Hegemonic masculinity establishes its hegemony partly by its claim to embody the power of reason, and thus represent the interest of the whole society.” 14 However, like westerns themselves, the concept of hegemonic masculinity can been adapted to fit the needs of ever evolving discourses in a variety of fields. Through discussing redefinitions of masculinity, I will see whether the theory of hegemonic masculinity has been adapted to fit the archetypal masculine American national identity. Finally, I will argue the
9 Young, Iris Marion. “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State” in W Stands
for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender. Duke University Press. 2007. Print. P 116
10 Ibid. P115
11 Ducat, Stephen J. The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. Boston: Beacon Press. Print. 2004. p227
12 Noonan, Peggy. “Welcome Back Duke” Wall Street Journal. October 12, 2001. Accessed 29 April 2016. <http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122451174798650085>
13 Connell, R. W. Masculinities. University of California Press. Print. 2005. P 186 14 Ibid. p149
national imaginary and evaluate this through masculinity as a construct in America post 9/11. I will demonstrate that the neo western is associated with a need for masculine individual regeneration as well as a remasculinisation of the national ego in times of turmoil and show there has been a shift in hyper masculine national identity.
The western is a uniquely American genre: the concept of the West represents the founding of the country, an idealised version of the American Dream in which Americans believed they could achieve anything on a new frontier. It is not surprising that after September 11th 2001, filmmakers seem to have revisited the genre in search of a clearer America and a clearer view of masculinity. Essentially this is impossible to determine; the four films I will analyse do not aid in depicting a transpicuous version of masculinity or American identity, but present in all of them is a yearning for this. In 2008, there was an influx of neo westerns; a remake of the 1957 3:10 to Yuma, Blue Eyes, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. In this thesis, I analyse the latter three films aforementioned along with the more recent The Revenant (2015), in four separate chapters. Present in these films are men who do not function as individuals but rather as a reaction to other men. Direct conflict between pairs men pervade all four films and as such, autonomy in neo westerns is depicted as a myth due to this autonomy being dependent upon other men. In exploring the recreation of gendered American national identity I will demonstrate how these four films interrogate masculinity in a cultural context which is being newly asserted and recurrently undergoing crisis. I will analyse how threats to America’s physical security can be formulated as a threat on masculinity itself and thus investigate if there has been a reimagining of masculine ideology.
Chapter one focuses on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007) which reinforces Laura Mulvey’s Lacanian analysis of the male hero, representative of an ideal ego on the cinema screen. I will explore the ways bodily unity on screen relates to a concept of mirror identification and thus, how neo westerns can be seen to function as a mode of representation that
can turn illusion into identity. Moreover, I will also explore Judith Butler’s concept of gender in the chapter to investigate the complicity between masculinity, western iconography and the cultural implications of this. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford depicts Robert Ford’s fanatical obsession of Jesse James though the myth exposed leads to Ford shooting his hero in the back of the head. This is an apt metaphor for the neo western’s own violent demythologising.
Whereas chapter one explores the performance of the myth of the masculine figure, chapter two on No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007) examines a film that is arguably about the failure of this myth. The film depicts a precipitous degeneration in the moral fiber of American society where the security of its citizens has become a virtual anachronism. Due to its lack of resolution or reaffirmation, the film does not confront uncertainties and conflict values which cause anxiety to 21st century Americans. For Matthew Carter, the film becomes a “critique of the influence that the myth of the West holds over the sociopolitical trajectory of the presentday United States in its role as the world’s figurative lawman.” 15 Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) lacks agency and does not deliver justice to his community. As such, Bell “manages to transcend his fate by recognising his own limitations as a lawman and the realisation he is not a hero.” Sheriff Ed Tom Bell never confronts the murderer; there is no final 16 showdown, as in the classic western. Whereas No Country for Old Men grounds evil and violence in a remorseless nature, There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) roots greed, violence and madness in a capitalist society which is undermined by the pillars of religion and family. Chapter three assesses the juxtaposition between religion and capitalism as played out by two avaricious egocentric adversaries at the turn of the twentieth century. I will show how this film depicts surrogate family relationships in an inimical capitalistic realm as well as illustrating that the pursuit of oil can only result in blood. Chapter four concentrates on a stage for male power in conflict with both the wilderness and an
15 Carter, Matthew. Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood's Frontier Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Print. 2015. p196
adversary as shown in The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu , 2015). The vision of a natural man from a new perspective deconstructs the traditional “natural” manliness of the western hero and indicates a new attitude towards the hero. Nature is the one transcendent element in the film; the one portrayed as immense and the ideal towards which human nature strives and is the contemporary return to the concept of America as a frontier wilderness, as well as an reenactment of the American dialectic between civilisation and nature. I will assess how men’s fear of losing their mastery and identity, both of which neo westerns constantly reinvent, is explored in this conflict of man vs the wilderness.
Hero? Myth? Man
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford gives an account of how the western masculine myth is an active agent on the interpretation of men’s masculinity and their vision of themselves, illustrating the inimical role the western has in creating masculinity. I believe it is imperative to analyse the myth of Jesse James himself in order to see which route this masculinity has taken. However, that is not to state contemporary society's definitions of masculinity are more informed today than any denotations which antecede it, or that society's definitions of masculinity will indicatively alter due to a western, but rather contemporary society abides in reflecting ideal manhood in neo westerns. Perhaps the challenge that Andrew Dominik faced was to accommodate the want for a regenerated manhood. Dominik uses doubling, gaze and identification which makes explicit how repetition is used to confirm masculinity in and by means of the western. The film tells concentrates upon Jesse James’s (Brad Pitt) murder by Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) who imitates Jesse’s habits, mannerisms and physical appearance. After shooting Jesse, and hoping to replicate his hero status within society, Ford becomes a minor celebrity in a theatre show in which he presents himself as James’s killer, whilst Ford’s brother plays Jesse’s role. Reflecting on the performativity of genre and gender construction and the male gaze focused upon other men, the film explores how the myth of manhood has been created and reproduced.
Through depicting the events after the normal conclusion of a Western (shootout) and through illustrating the fate of Jesse’s killer, The Assassination of Jesse James provides the missing link between social memory and reconstructed histories that Westerns traditionally disguise. The film therefore engages, at a metalevel, a revision of history. In Paul Connerton’s How Societies Remember , he describes this process:
We identify a particular action by recalling at least two types of context for that action. We situate the agents’ behavior with reference to its place in their life history; and we situate that behavior also with reference to its place in the history of social settings to which they belong. The narrative of one life is part of an interconnecting set of narratives; it is embedded in the story of those groups from which individuals derive their identity.17
Identity, according to Connerton, is necessarily linked to the narratives of others. This is a perfect description of the plot of Dominik’s film, where Ford defines his character through the prism of Jesse James. When Ford finally kills James, and Ford is subsequently shot by O’Kelly, the murder motif repeats in order to show the inherently linked causation between past, present, and future selves of identity. The narrator states, “By his own approximation, Bob assassinated Jesse James over 800 times. He suspected no one in history had ever or so often or so publicly recapitulated an act of betrayal.” In this way, the film is alluding to its own constructed mythological roots akin to those of the play Ford acts in: people watch the performance and reconstruct the situations as fact. Those facts then become more powerful than other depictions as they are disseminated throughout mainstream culture, and eventually the fabrication becomes truthlike. Foucault, in his discussion of film and popular memory, ponders the complexity of politically charged historical recreation films, which I suggest The Assassination of Jesse James adheres to; “The problem’s not the hero, but the struggle. Can you make a film about a struggle without going through the traditional process of creating heroes? It is a new form of an old problem.” Foucault 18 discusses the contesting truths of historical versus constructed histories as in important part of standard narrative that comprises social histories: myth and memory are utilised by the film to reflect on conceptions of history as fluid and dynamic. “This is one way of reprogramming popular memory, which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been.” 19
17 Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print. 1989. p21
18 Foucault, Michel. “Film and Popular Memory.” Foucault Live (Interviews, 19611984) Ed. Lotringer, Sylvere. New York: Semiotext(e). 1989. Translated by Martin Jordin. p62
Nostalgia, in The Assassination of Jesse James is not just a yearning for a historical past and for the old West, but also for the masculine narcissism which Pitt represents. Paradoxically, the privilege of film as being an instant form of nostalgia is the current representation of current events on film. The visuality of the medium allows for audiences to conflate remembered and actual instances as being one and the same. Westerns also tend to engage on mythology far more frequently than historiography. However, western mythology is set in a pseudohistorical framework which often camouflages its mythographic project. Philip French has argued that the western is about America reinventing and 20 reinterpreting her own past, yet through the realist strategy of narration that fuses the historical and the 21 discursive. Jesse James, as an American legend, is that of a cultural phenomenon so dispersed in American popular culture that any endeavour for historical ambiguity is almost rendered impossible. There have been numerous portrayals of the legend of Jesse James, from King's Jesse James (1939) to Mayfield's American Outlaws (2001). These unremitting remakes illustrate the mythic depictions of Jesse James which capitalise on large scale political, social and historical themes. Andrew Dominik's retelling of the Jesse James story illustrates the difficulties of retelling the past reliably. Indeed, the legend of the man is wholly at odds with most accounts of his actual life. However, the legendary gunslinger Jesse James has a part in the American national identity much akin to that of Robin Hood. A trainrobbing bandit who lived from 1847 to 1882, James was a showman who usually targeted the money of large banks and companies rather than simply holding up ordinary people. This, combined with his popular association with the postCivil War Confederate resistance, turned him into a legend in his own lifetime. And, as with all such figures, it was his untimely and unusual death that sealed his immortality.
The gaze which passes from Robert Ford to Jesse James questions Laura Mulvey's notion of the cinematic gaze which she discusses in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema . This has been capitalised upon by Steve Neale and Paul Willemen who both claim the heterosexual male gaze can be fixed upon
20 Walker, Janet. Westerns Through History. London: Routledge. Print. 2013. p31 21 French, Philip. “Thoroughly modern Marie” The Observer. 22 October 2006.
male characters, especially when the genre of the western is congested with male bodies and absent of female characters. Neale explores the implication of Mulvey’s observation about the sadistic nature of the cinematic gaze for issues of masculinity, arguing that the male body in popular imagery is feminised and objectified by the viewer. Contrary to Mulvey’s notion, Neale focuses upon the narcissistic identification of males from an early stage of recognition, to the idea that the ego is sustained by the powerful and omnipresent representation in westerns. The gaze, therefore, has to move away from the scopophilic (pleasure in looking) male gaze to identification of the viewer's self, not only with the central character, but to varying degrees, all characters. Neale states when a male is looking at another male performing body on the screen, Mulvey's scopophilia is superseded by a fetishistic look, in which the male spectator identifies with the object of his gaze. In no other genre is this more fitting than the western, since the male gaze is no longer directed to the female body as Mulvey claims, rather to another male, as the “ideal ego.” The western presents “an obsession with images and definitions of masculinity and masculine codes of
22
behaviour, and with images of male narcissism.” 23 This narcissism which relates to phantasies is especially prevalent in The Assassination and is, as Mulvey claims, the “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego.” 24 The mythic interpretation of Jesse James as the people’s hero is deconstructed and the film illustrates how this position is harmful through depicting Jesse as a man uncertain of his place as a bandit and a killer.
In the wake of Butler’s understanding of gender, the film reinforces the idea that gender is a performative construction and shows the different stages through which Bob passes in his attempt to perform as Jesse James. First reading dime novels, then collecting objects, later physically copying and quoting Jesse’s rhetoric, Bob prepares to substitute the original Jesse. In this way the film shows that imagination and processes of copying or performing are active and creative, and demonstrates that the
22 Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3). Autumn 1975. pp6 18
23 Neale, Steve. Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema. Screen 24 (6). December 1983. p15
relation between the western and masculinity is not natural but constructed. Defining masculinity through this process becomes doubly performative, since
Bob is copying something that is a fantasy of his own idolising vision, in its turn generated by the mythopoetic discourse of the dime novels he reads. The audience meets Bob after he has already passed through and consumed the cultural process by which he recognises Jesse as a model to imitate. Furthermore, Bob Ford’s young age in Dominik’s film (he is nineteen) makes processes of gendered identity building and the gaze of western masculinities easier to investigate. It is probably as a consequence of his young age that
Bob is unable to recognise his fascination with Jesse as a process fostered by cultural products; quite the opposite, he is prey to a desire to look, touch, and consume Jesse’s persona, wanting to achieve that outstanding masculinity he sees in Jesse as a step towards his entrance into the world of men. The ideal ego may be the model with which the subject, here Bob Ford, identifies to and to which it inspires, may also be a source of further images and feelings of castration inasmuch as that ideal is something to which the subject is never adequate. This permeates Mulvey's notion narcissistic images of masculinity which is the contradiction between narcissism and the law, between an image of authority and social authority, an argument which she grounds in the western.Through investigating the character of Bob Ford, The Assassination cautions against the harmful consequences of mythic visions of masculinity and legitimising models. Rather than being exclusively an empowering device, male to male gaze as proposed in and by the western may have detrimental consequences for the development of paradigms of masculinity. As much as processes of copying are considered, Bob does not only venerate his hero, but as a young man finding his way into manhood he also tries to reproduce Jesse’s gestures and way of talking to train his body to physically perform Jesse James. As we learn from the voiceover, “if Jesse palavered with another person, Bob secretaried their dialogue, getting each inflection, reading every gesture and tick, as if he wanted to compose a biography of the outlaw, or as if he were preparing an impersonation.” Citing Butler’s claim
that gender is “instituted through a stylised repetition of acts” Bob’s obsessive study and copying of 25 Jesse James points out the repetitive and performative character of creative processes of masculinity. The voiceover informs us Bob was “renowned at twenty as Jesse was after fourteen years of Grand Larceny” and could be “identified correctly by more citizens than could the President of the United States.” Instead of representing a moment of triumph, Bob's performance reiterates his failure to become the man he wanted to be. Butler contends that “the act that one does, the act that one performs, is in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene.” 26 There is also additional aspect of the performative aspects of identity in the one year later sequence after the assassination, where Robert Ford and his brother Charley are infamous actors in New York in performing the legendary assassination on stage for audiences. Now, the gaze has been inverted, and the brothers are looked upon by the viewing public. However, not even on stage can Bob realise his dream of becoming Jesse and in the repetitive creation he becomes like Jean Baudrillard suggests, a simulacrum of himself. The Assassination therefore, is an elegy to the extremity of the legend and the myth whilst simultaneously leaving nostalgia of traditional forms of masculinity behind. Dominik questions the processes which have created a mythic discourse of the West; dime novels, theatre performances and cinema as the medium that narrates the story the viewer is presented with.
Dominik’s film reflects upon the reenactment ritual of cinematic experience as both critical to the genre of westerns as well as being indicative of a necessary national process. The film provides a national narrative of individual heroism and the explanation for Jesse James’s longevity in the American consciousness lies in the myth’s adaptability, flexibility and considerable narrative variation over time and across a broad social and cultural spectrum. The Assassination of Jesse James examines the process of myth building with imagery that recalls its folklore roots while simultaneously questioning the
25 Butler, Judith. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Dec., 1988)
authenticity of both imagery and narrative. The voiceover yields Jesse James role as an outlaw yet simultaneously, recedes that which makes him a legend. The facts about Jesse refer to his homes, city life, to his wounded body and to his family life. These are facts which are not part of James's mythic status; facts which have been banished from collective memory. The voiceover narration also provides numerous hyperboles that elaborate on the mythic experience of Jesse as experienced by Bob: “If he neared animals, they retreated. Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rain fell straighter, clocks slowed.” In deceiving the audience, perhaps in order to illustrate the blurring of lines between the man and the myth, the narration acts alongside shots which combine with Jesse’s pensive face which cross dissolves into dreamlike landscapes, is utilised not only to dispel these myths but also to cement the blurred periphery of fact and fiction in the national consciousness and imagination of America. It could be considered that Jesse's myth and the real Jesse were difficult to distinguish due to the fact Jesse fuelled the myth himself. Although Jesse explains to Bob Ford that the dime novels and newspaper articles which nurture the myth are “all lies,” this is of secondary importance to Bob, who is looking for his hero to duplicate and become what he considers a living legend.
The day of Jesse James’s assassination could be considered to be a day of reckoning between old and new manhood; as Jesse walks into the living room, the camera pans around Bob in a pointofview shot from Jesse’s perspective, indicating that Jesse and Bob will settle their score. Whilst dusting a picture of a horse, Jesse is shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford. The force of the gunshot makes Jesse’s head bounce against the picture, breaking the glass of the frame and the camera shows in full length, Jesse’s body crumpling to the floor. This body could be of anybody; his mythic body is deprived (albeit temporarily) of any heroism.
Fig 2.1: Jesse being shot by Robert Ford.
Bob Ford does not inherit Jesse’s mythic status. Instead Bob is destined to be the “necessarily inadequate embodiment of the hero figuration” and is instead is labelled as a coward who has bereaved 27 America of its collective hero. America establishes itself in the realm of the cultural imaginary, finding articulation through “images, stories and legends that are shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society.” America constructed the tortuous interaction of performative acts and the cultural 28 imaginary; myths, images and ideas which imbues the cultural imaginary with a sense of reality and truth. It should be noted that Carter finds many of the arguments about the Western forced and often “suggestive of an (unconscious) ideological correlation between producers of popular culture, policy
27 Boon, Kevin Alexander. “Heroes, Metanarratives, and the Paradox of Masculinity in Contemporary Western Culture.” The Journal of Men’s Studies, 13.3. 2005. p304
makers in the United States and historical events.” Ever so adroitly, scene after scene, Dominik steers 29 Jesse and Bob towards their enmeshed destinies. The character of Jesse James in the film is therefore not the simple, twodimensional parody of western hero but an active agent in history, similar to Christian Metz’s imaginary signifier, where the object on screen is separate from the object it represents in the real and physical world. Awareness of this distinction between real and representation contrasts severely with they way traditional western’s operate. Bob’s attempt at defining his masculinity through his connection with Jesse is not fulfilling because Jesse does not recognise Bob as his heir and also due to the mythic aura surrounding Jesse is not transferable. Bob’s idea of Jesse as the hero against whom he compares his 30 masculinity “simultaneously denotes manhood and demotes male identity” as the idealisation of Jesse 31 provides a model to which aspire that remains synchronous to deducible failure. The creation of masculinity through imitation is the light exposed as a twofold process. On one hand “heroes are an important inner maker of identity” yet on the other they are depicted as “injurious at the level of 32 individualized masculine identity, as the qualities of the idealized hero figure are always and necessarily absent from individual men.” With Neale and Mulvey’s notion of the ideal ego being of profound 33 contradictions, aiming to be the model with which the subject aspires but also the ideal with which the subject is never adequate, it can be assumed that Jesse James is part of the spectacular gaze which is as 34 unattainable as the product of a mythic discourse.
29 Carter, Matthew. Myth of the Westerner: New Perspectives on Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Print. 2014. p264
30 Bordin, Elisa. Masculinity and Westerns: Regenerations at the Turn of the Millennium. Verona: Ombre Corte. Print. 2014. p217 31 Boon, Kevin Alexander. “Heroes, Metanarratives, and the Paradox of Masculinity in Contemporary Western Culture.” The Journal of Men’s Studies, 13.3. 2005. p304 32 Porpora, Douglas V. “Personal Heroes, Religion, and Transcendental Metanarratives.” Sociological Forum, 11.2, 1996: p211. 33 Ibid. Boon. p304
34 Neale, Steve. Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema. Screen 24 (6). December 1983.
Lee Clarke Mitchell considers the western hero’s “azure gaze...essential to the delineation of
masculinity.” The relationship between James and Ford, whether fatherson or heroworshiper relation35 to the outlaw could be contested to be related to general concerns about masculinity; how it has been performatively reproduced and in such a widespread way by means of the western. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty claims that the central questions regarding culture revolves around gender roles, purpose in life and death as well as dealing with concerns of culture and its ambitions to define perspectives, morals and identities through stories. Filmic myths and traditional myths also conflate as the stories alter from film to film. Although looking like, identifying with, and substituting Jesse, Bob is forever doomed to be the inadequate embodiment of his (and our) hero. Dominik is rather more interested in questioning the processes which have created the mythic discourse of the West, metanarratively recovering all the stages of possible western performances, dime novels, theatrical performances, and cinema as the medium that narrates the story the viewer is given.
Fig 2.2: Bob Ford watching Jesse bathe.
35 Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print. 1996. P156
The Western hero myth is deconstructed into its formulaic representations: masculine figures connote power through symbols such as fog, shadows, and open spaces; while the weaker characters, such as the women and “cowards” are confined to door frames and windows. Thus, the few women in The Assassination of Jesse James are often depicted gazing placidly out of windows, confined by not only men’s presence on screen but by actual space itself. In addition, most of Bob Ford’s inquisitive watch of Jesse takes place through screens and doors and via this symbolism he is cast as a coward as the title of the film supposes. This heavyhanded symbolic imagery is then immediately read by the audience as the clichéd style of the western. When the audience becomes aware of these devices, the mechanism of film style is exposed and thus the art direction reveals this formula as reenacted myth. After one sequence where Bob curiously meanders after Jesse through town and notes his actions, Bob’s peering through the door is as an act of invasion of Jesse’s private space, much like in the scene where Bob watches Jesse bathe in the bathtub. Lee Clark Mitchell argues that the male body is put on display in westerns so the audience can watch “men becoming men...by being restored to their male bodies.” Mitchell goes on to 36 explain this most often occurs in the bathtub. (See fig 2.2) “No other genre has men bathe so often as Westerns, where they repeatedly strip down to nothing more than an occasional hat, cigar and bubbles.” 37 This scene problematises the male to male gaze and implies that the sexual gaze and and the look of identification can overlap in the western. The scene does not rationalise Bob’s watching of Jesse, instead rendering him merely visually ingesting Jesse’s corporeality in preparation for a future substitution. Bob wishes to look and consume Jesse’s persona, wanting to achieve the masculinity on display as a step towards his entrance into the world of men. Jesse watching Bob is a positioned as being a frame within the frame of the film screen itself, and Jesse’s ability to see the hidden action of the scene is like the
36 Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print. 1996. p151
audience’s own omnipotent perspective on these characters. Dominik is therefore drawing attention to not only the filming process itself through framing Jesse, but through showing films within frames, he is creating a new element in the narrative and metafictional world.
The fastidious anxiety in post 9/11 masculinity is rooted firmly in the failures of hero ideology which I believe is inextricably linked to recalling the founding masculine myths of America. The narrative at the crux of the reaction in the wake of September 11th was less about the act of terrorism than about the idealised national identity concerning America's past. James Berger suggests “truth” as that which “must be continually imagined” in the post 9/11 context of America’s national trauma. The 38 film wallows in a lost and empty world the film tells of nostalgia for a safe, patriarchal culture. As westerns patronise narratives of past cultural crisis's the possibility of “a man with a gun...silhouetted against and empty landscape, [is] the figure capable of engaging us in the midst of anxieties.” If Jesse 39 James is the apotheosis of the American western hero, the embodiment of American masculine values, there is at play then, an active American masculinity. From Bob’s perspective, Jesse is presented not as a man, but as a legend. The shot before the first train robbery cinematographically shows this enchantment as it evokes the memory of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer over a Sea of Fog which validates the romantic facade that has been framing Jesse James in both the imagination of Robert Ford and that of America.
38 Berger, James. 'There's No Backhand To This,' in ed. Greenberg, Judith. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Print. 2003. p43
Fig 2.3: Jesse James shrouded in fog.
Fig 2.4: Caspar David Friedrich. “Wanderer of a Sea of Fog” 1818. Kunsthalle Hamburg. Germany.
The multiple perspectives that are derived in this staging are reflective of the layering of different points of view that create a film narrative. Therefore, Dominik’s film is a reflexive condensation of varied collections of memories and different perspectives, in other words, precisely what is required in the translation of fact on to the screen image and what has fuelled the myth of Jesse James. Deakin’s cinematography seems simultaneously new and antique. An effect added to by the striking, intermittent use of filters producing a radial blur around a clear central image as if looking through a kaleidoscope. In both the palette and several shot compositions there are shades of impressionism and the time of the film’s setting, new art of photography. There are multiple shots of the film which bear blurred edges, reminiscent of photographs from a daguerreotype and give sequences a dreamlike quality.
Fig 2.5: Shot of inside of a saloon.
This fragmented effect of the cinematography evokes the notion of preserving Jesse the man in the national memory as well as fuelling the myth of a stoic outlaw. The elements of photography work in the part to illustrate the historic past as well as towards the end of the film, Dominik reconstructs the photographing of Jesse's corpse as well as interlacing the actual picture of Jesse's dead body in the film footage. Stylistically, the film exploits its genre’s roots and the imagistic mechanisms upon which westerns traditionally rely.
Fig 2.6: Reflection of lens showing Jesse James’ body.
The Assassination rebukes against the harmful consequences of mythic versions of masculinity as male to male gaze, as proposed in and by the western, may have pernicious repercussions for the development of paradigms of masculinity. As a neo western, the film questions the western genre in and of itself, whilst probing how the genre define masculinity. Through revealing perpetuation of white hegemonic masculinity, the film liberates visual and narrative to elucidate that this masculinity is imagined. Thus, the relationship between Robert Ford and Jesse James schematises the quandary of contemporaneous American masculinity.
Old Lawman. New evil.
The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men explores the idea that America, once a place of serenity and comfort, is now occupied by evil and violence. The film is a provocative and moving tale which revolves around three men and how they face the violence of modern society. Violence as an ideology is criticised through visual representations, use of dialogue and gratuitous acts throughout the film which illustrates the Coen’s stance on American society. The film is told through intertwined stories of murder, theft and incomprehensible acts of inhumanity taking place in 1980’s America and takes a pessimistic look at masculinity. Whilst it has been interpreted that the film can be read an antiBushCheney allegory where law and patriarchy are ineffective to deal with terror, the film’s 40 commentary on the ways in which the Bush government turned final control into an ultimate political value post 9/11 suggests that such a response functions within a theological assumption which is disassembled in the representation of the confrontation between the retiring Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and the hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) . The plot of the film follows a working class 41 man, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who finds a suitcase filled with $2 million from a Mexican drug deal which went wrong and, as a result, is pursued by criminals, lawmen and bounty hunters.
In No Country for Old Men existence without essential meaning is explored as are the themes of destructive fate, redemption, good vs evil binary and the film is imbued by an existential ethos of anxiety, dread and the impending possibility of death. The film conjoins Bell and the antagonist Chigurh, through having the two adversary characters often occupying the same distinct spaces, thus relating to the inhabitation of space among the people of the country. The dearth of thematic explicitness, however,
40 Cho, Daniel as cited in Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the BushCheney Era ed. Douglas M. Kellner. John Wiley & Sons. Print. 2011. p 1995
41 De Boever, Arne. “The Politics of Retirement: Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men after September 11.” Image & Narrative. Issue Vol.X, Issue 2 (25.) L'auteur et son imaginaire: l'élaboration de la singularité / The author and his imaginary: the development of particularity. June 2009.
allows Bell, Chigurh and Moss to become paradigms for the American character as opposed to mere 42 recalcitrant individuals. Chigurh serves as a strong thematic highlight in the film; he represents the evil in the world and the randomness of chance, as well as, paradoxically, the inevitability of fate. Bell and Chigurh represent a jarring thematic marriage where there is simply no good or evil; instead, there is only fate and chance and whatever lies in between. There is questioning of the "new kind" of American and evil that Sheriff Bell cannot comprehend. I will examine how men in this film represent rapidly changing society and how they represent different components of an archaic patriarchal system; Sheriff Bell as a police officer is the literal law, Llewelyn Moss as a hunter symbolises a law of domination at the expense of others and Chigurh as a hitman represents an excessive code of law and fate.
No Country for Old Men begins, similar to all of the other Coen brothers films, with an establishing shot of the landscape, the wide open expanses of the vast west Texas plain. The first twenty minutes of the film contain little dialogue, apart from the voiceover narration which breaks the silence of the landscape as Tommy Lee Jones, the local sheriff, informs the viewer about times past. Indicative of times that times that lay ahead, Sheriff Bell recalls sending a teenage boy to the electric chair for what was called a “crime of passion” but Bell sees no passion in it. He states the boy told him he would have killed sooner or later and, revolted by this murder, Bell is unable to make sense of his times and is trapped in a nostalgia for times passed. His expressing guilt for sending this boy to his death is symptomatic of how society has become transformed in such a way as to have alienated Sheriff Bell. What is evoked through the fusing of narration and the visual landscape the scene evokes images of the American West and the dangers of the wilderness. The montage of desert imagery and a few establishing shots representing the arrest of the central antagonist Anton Chigurh, requires the viewer to imagine and
42 a character which Stephen McVeigh in The American Western claims is one imbued with the “values of the frontiersman: optimism, proaction, energy and determination.”
simultaneously visualise the relation between the visual and aural tracks and functions as a sort of pedagogical entrance into the visual regime of the film.
Alan Noble in his article “Hope Defered: No Country for Old Men” expressed that without Sheriff Bell’s first person narration in the film, the Coen brothers fail to “give us the dialogue and narrative...necessary to understand the violence we see.” However, I contend that although there is a 43 surplus of violence in the film, much of this violence is without logic or reason which is indicative of American society. Furthermore, Sheriff Bell contextualises through his narration, the violence which occurs in the film as the clash between the old world and the new one replacing it. Society, however, fails to be tangible to Bell, which is at the crux of the film: American values solely exist in old men. “I think once you stop hearing sir and madam, the rest is soon to follow.” The younger generation holds a nihilistic viewpoint; no other characters in the film, beyond Bell, believe in anything. Chigurh adheres to moral nihilism, where moral judgements are entirely individual and arbitrary and he admits no rational justification or criticism. Whilst Bell’s narration offers a facile perspective of America, the film 44 manages to link the sheriff’s heightened vulnerability and the terror of Anton Chigurh to disclose the interrelation between government and terror through the voiceover narration.
The voiceover accompanies Chigurh’s arrest and the foundational weaving together of the images is developed later on in the film when Bell visits Llewelyn Moss’s trailer in search of him and the missing suitcase of money. Chigurh visited the trailer only minutes before and Bell sits in exactly the same spot where Chigurh had been sitting and like Chigurh, the sheriff sees his reflection in Moss’s television screen. In No Country for Old Men , the viewer’s apprehension of the filmic world is akin to Sheriff Bell’s discerning of visual and aural clues, and transformation from distant isolated observer to active
43 Noble, Alan, “Hope Defered: No Country For Old Men” in Christ & Pop Culture.13 December 2007. <http://christandpopculture.com/hopedeferednocountryforoldmen/> accessed 10 April 2016. Online.
44 Crosby, Donald, A. The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism. SUNY Press. Print. 1988. p11
participant. A reverse point of view shot shows us the television screen where the figure of Anton Chigurh looms abstracted and motionless with light streaming from a window behind his back, his figure is reduced to a projected shadow. He is transfixed by his projected image. A few moments later as Ed Tom Bell visits the same location also looking for Llewelyn Moss, he replicates Chigurh’s ritual. He settles on the same coach and pours himself a glass of milk from the same bottle out of which Anton Chigurh was drinking earlier. Sitting on the sofa, he also gets transfixed by his projected image on the television screen in the same affective but unqualified response. The television screen acts to project, certainly in the 80’s when the film was set, images of classical westerns into the domestic sphere. What is conveyed, however, is not a clear John Wayneesque figure but a blurred silhouette of a lawman who is attempting to define his image as a man. Whereas in The Assassination of Jesse James the performance of masculinity at play is active and performative, here Bell’s reflection is static. He appears quiet and indiscernible, unable to configure his masculinity as reflected for him.
Both of these reflective emblematic moments require the viewer’s deciphering: the repetition of actions, composition and editing structure invite a symbolic reading which parallel and link the fate of these two characters. The image we see is further distorted, however, by the concave element of the screen a visual critique. In other words, the image distortion fails to correspond to the current reality (time and space) that he is occupying. Important to this discussion are the ideas that, for Deleuze, reflections represent the originary form of time where everything, including we as human beings, is doubled in every instant. Deleuze's most simple example is of a reflection in film is that of a character looking in a mirror. The audience is able to look between the reflected image and the character and determine which one is which. The reflection for Deleuze can be a substitute for virtual memory and the character for actual perception. The cyclical nature between actual image and virtual memory happens when the image or “present situation attains ‘deeper levels of reality.” 45
45 Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The MovementImage. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Print. 1986.
Fig 3.1: Reflection of Sheriff Bell on television screen.
An image, such as the television screen above, presents and represents actual and virtual, present and past, time image or a direct image of time. Bell and Chigurh’s images overlap and although the two men never meet in the film they are instead affiliated in this preternatural moment as haunted and haunting presences of the West, as well as juxtaposed mirror images of each other. However, Bell fails to conform to mythic expectations and Chigurh flouts identity or narrative, becoming instead a horrifying imagining of a world out of control; combined they blend into a perverse synthesised identity which is alive in the West. The opposition between Chigurh and the sheriff reveals an intimacy and similitude between the pair as well as what these two men stand for; government and terror. Tommy Lee Jones’s
reflection whilst wearing a cowboy hat mirror that of George Bush’s public appearances post 9/11 in Stetsons which allayed the fears of the nation, presenting the President as a man of courage and dependability; attributes which, in the classical western, are associated with a solitary cowboy fighting evil. Since 9/11 a previously considered chauvinistic paradigm of protectorate masculinity has returned to the fore of not only films but television also. Bell, as a lawman who retires at the end of film due to his inability to comprehend modern society, is as incompetent at defending his homestead as Bush was.
Bell enjoys hearing about the old times whenever possible as those times were easier to comprehend, although he cannot help but compare himself against them. The voice over concluded its monologue thus:
“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I am afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard… He would have to say, okay, I’ll be part of this world.”
Through talking directly to the viewer, the narrator introduces the moral dilemma of the character and the possibility of introspection and selfknowledge. Nevertheless, the visual aspect of the film indicates that achieving awareness is arbitrated by the deliberate process of partial recognition, a sort of coming into consciousness based on suggestive yet fundamentally cryptic images. Sheriff Bell illustrates what Friedrich Nietzsche identifies as one of the dangers of history and its potentially deadening effect on the present, due to Bell being from a family of lawmen. In relation to judging the past Nietzsche states “For as we are merely the resultant of previous generations, we are also resultant of their errors, passions and mistakes, indeed of their crimes.” It becomes clear that in this context, Nietzsche wished to 46 illustrate that men have an inherent nature which is resultant of previous generations and they cannot distinguish themselves from it even if they comprehend it is flawed. In calling for men to obliterate their
46 Strong, Tracy B., Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Berkeley, University of California Press. Print. 1988. p274
pasts and replace it with a new one will provide them with a new nature and without this new form, men will remain embroiled in the dissatisfaction which are a necessary characteristic of their present nature.
No Country for Old Men is a comingofage tale in which the real protagonist, Sheriff Bell, comes to understand his place in the universe. Conceivably, Bell learns what Carl Jung says is “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a candle in the darkness of mere being.” Bell believes in a conservative 47 worldview in which family and community deserve to be the driving force between the individual and society and in which good and evil are constantly in conflict with each other, although evil is now flourishing. Chigurh on the other hand, is amoral and believes he is a force of sheer will who can live without any social restrictions. Yet despite Chigurh escaping justice and Bell seeing Chigurh as representative of a new soulless generation, driven by money, I argue the film has, nevertheless has somewhat of a happy ending. When Bell details his dream, it could be allegorised to his conception of selfforgiveness. In sensing that the goals he had set himself were too high; “And then I woke up” illustrates he is now awake after having lived in a dream for his whole life. Bell has realised that the universe is governed by a dark force that includes the Manichean (good vs evil) structure Bell advances as an explanation for what has happened to his society. He believes the genesis of evil is savage individualism which allows greed and violence to prevail. Old narratives of settlement, hegemony and national belonging are endangered when challenged by the inexorable borderlands’ logic of violent drug cartels, illegal immigration and corporations encapsulated in the wraithlike schemes of Chigurh.
It is worthy to note that the film’s title, and the Cormac McCarthy book on which it is based, is drawn from William Butler Yeats’s poem Sailing to Byzantium . The central message of the poem is that in order to be happy in old age, we should abandon the world’s more primal pleasures and turn to the eternal instead. As the film approaches its end, its focus changes from the external to the internal; and the suitcase of money is ultimately rendered inconsequential. The ending could be read as there is no
47 Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Fontana Press; New Ed edition. Print. 2013. p46
redemption for any character or any form of transformation for Chigurh and this pessimism is what Joan Mellen has described as a downward turn of American culture. It is reflective of a dominant culture mood and moreover could be seen as an inversion of the depiction of the north and south of the border. The 48 film tells of what is happening to the United States, the world, and every individual is a modification of a dynamic that recurs throughout personal and political history. The ending of the film initiates a sense of loss; not only the loss of money, but the loss of way the sheriff perceives the modern world and his relationship to it. Bell realises through his conversation with Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin) that one cannot act alone, as old mythic cowboys did for as Ellis implies, the world cannot be ordered or stopped. Neither is it about one’s own selfinterested feelings or inner turmoil, for there is always a bigger, collective picture beyond the self. “This country is hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it, yet folks never seem to hold it to account.” The devil here can be analogised to Chigurh, like a ghost haunting from the West’s past, as if the violence alive in the country itself is an uprising of the buried and repressed legacy of conquest endlessly visited on and challenging the present. The new West in the film stands as 49 a collapse of the promise of the domestication of the wilderness and the visual clues suggest that the urbanisation of the natural landscape. Bell lacks agency, never seems to be in control and trails behind the events, making the audience wonder how the Sheriff will ever deliver justice.
Violence is integral to westerns and also contemporary society, violence disrupts and threatens the social order which Bell abides by. The polarity between Bell and Chigurh is a conflict of individual will which cannot coexist with Bell in a position of power within society. Bell's inability to change fate and can only make lugubrious comparisons between the intelligible past and the unintelligible present. Friedrich Nietzsche also attributed tedium to the old age of mankind and claimed it would be relieved by the murderous acts of “a pale criminal.” This pale criminal, similar to Chigurh, transcends “money or
48 Mellon, Joan. “Spiraling Downward: America in Days of Heaven, In the Valley of Elah, and No Country for Old Men.” Film Quarterly 61.3. 2008.: 24–31. Print.
49 Campbell, Neil. “Spook Country: The Pensive West of No Country for Old Men” in Post Westerns: Cinema,
