The Monster That Lives On the Homestead

Victor LaValle, Lone Women: a Novel

Adelaide Henry carries her family’s oldest secret in a steamer trunk when she hurriedly leaves California’s Lucerne Valley in 1915. Her parents’ sudden deaths leave Adelaide unmarried, Black, and a woman during a time in America’s history when these are among the three worst things a person could be. So she packs only what she can carry and flees to the one place that will take a fugitive like her: the rural northern Montana plains.

This novel began when author and Columbia University professor Victor LaValle discovered that Montana didn’t discriminate in distributing lands under the Homestead Act. Where most states and territories required a male head of household, and usually only accorded land to White people, Montana took anyone who could sign the paperwork. What, LaValle wondered, would drive a woman to Montana’s severe, dry climate? His apparent answer is: everything that’s the opposite of the traditional Western genre.

The Montana which Adelaide encounters doesn’t jibe with the enthusiastic railroad pamphlets that enticed her here. It’s dry, austere, and weatherbeaten. But word gets around quickly about the young Black woman living alone, and allies begin making themselves available. Seems Adelaide isn’t the only “Lone Woman” homesteading these prairies, which have offered a semi-warm welcome to outcasts of all kinds. As long as her deadly secret stays inside her steamer trunk, Adelaide should be fine.

LaValle upends the stereotypes of Western literature. The classic genre authors—Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour—praised White, male individualists who didn’t need anybody else, invented their own rules, and survived by violence. Many Westerns, including Wister’s genre-defining The Virginian, feature the protagonist losing their baggage, whether by having it stolen or by abandoning it along the Trails. By contrast, Adelaide’s baggage is the most important treasure she owns, and she’ll die defending it.

Adelaide’s baggage is both literal and metaphorical. She’s terrified of whatever lives inside her steamer trunk, and sings it lullabies to keep it mollified. But she also carries paralyzing guilt. From page one, we know Adelaide feels responsible for her parents’ violent deaths, which she flees in a literal blaze of fear. We don’t know who or what killed them, because she won’t tell us, because she won’t accept what really happened and face up.

Victor LaValle

But underneath Montana’s ceaseless skies, Adelaide discovers she isn’t alone. All the “Lone Women” have secrets they’d rather bury. But they also need each other—another stark reversal from the Western genre, which usually preaches radical self-reliance. Nobody in this Montana can survive alone. But that mutuality takes two different forms. While the homesteading Lone Women learn to trust one another, exactly as they are, the townspeople close ranks against those they regard as outsiders.

Meanwhile, whatever lives inside Adelaide’s steamer trunk dominates her life. Here, LaValle takes on Jungian subtexts, as we increasingly suspect Adelaide is harboring her shadow self. Though we don’t get a glimpse inside the steamer for eighty pages, the Thing We Don’t Talk About becomes larger and larger, until we know, with doomed inevitability, that Adelaide’s big secret will come crashing out. And when it does, it’s guaranteed to hurt everyone she’s dared to trust.

In this, LaValle acknowledges something traditional Westerns ignore: that the people who settled the American West weren’t heroes. They were mostly people without a homeland, often fugitives, who took land stolen from Native peoples because they’d lost everything else. (LaValle addresses the land theft only obliquely, but it’s there.) The West was alienating and lonely, and it destroyed American illusions of class and race. White America celebrated the first settlers only after they were dead.

Traditional Westerns feature protagonists, often nameless (“The Virginian”) or mononymic (“Lassiter”), who never completely tell their stories. The past, to Western heroes, doesn’t matter. By contrast, in LaValle’s Montana, the past is all-important. Adelaide and her allies try to bury their past, but in keeping their secrets, the past becomes all-encompassing, threatening to destroy any present they might have. Their epic becomes a matter of determining who they can trust, and what they can share.

This novel starts out as Adelaide’s story, and early on, hews closely to her. But our ability to see through others’ eyes blossoms outward to the exact extent that Adelaide learns to trust others. As she starts seeing other Montana homesteaders as equals, so do we, and we begin receiving their stories of heartbreak and recovery. We begin seeing how everyone has their own steamer trunk, literal and metaphorical. And we, too, learn to trust.

See also: You Should Be Reading Victor LaValle

Take This Badge Off Of Me

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 47
Sam Peckinpah, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Pat Garrett (James Coburn) swaggers into the old Spanish mission where the outlaws congregate, showing off his newly minted badge. Not long ago, he was one among this anarchic bunch, but the territorial government has empowered him to bring law to the frontier. Garrett warns his old friend William Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) that the government wants Garrett specifically to bring down Bonney. Here’s your first and only warning, Garrett says: get out or get killed.

I remember first watching this movie as a teenager, impelled by the reputation of director Sam Peckinpah, and by this movie’s famous soundtrack, composed and recorded by Bob Dylan. The classic “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” comes from this movie. As a kid, I was appalled by this movie. I watched as it ticked down a list of traditional Western character tropes, all of whom died in the kind of bloodbath for which Peckinpah is famous.

What I didn’t understand, watching it with a kid’s wide-eyed situational ignorance, was the context in which this movie was made. Peckinpah himself had become an unlikely countercultural hero. Though twenty years older than his principal audience, he understood their Vietnam-era malaise. He also understood the self-destructive violence which drove characters in mercilessly explosive classics like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, as he feuded with production houses and self-medicated to control his bipolar disorder.

William Bonney, good-looking and rife with charm, ignores his friend’s warnings. He came west to escape Back-East law, and reinvented himself as Billy the Kid. For him, outlaw status isn’t a failure to obey the law; it’s an act of obedience to his truest self. He believes the frontier myth of complete autonomy; he sees the West as Rousseau’s “state of nature.” Billy scorns Garrett, leaves the mission, and returns to his career of rampage.

But if Billy has become the amoral extreme of libertarian thinking, Garrett has become the opposite. By accepting a badge, he also accepts the Back-East government’s strict Calvinist interpretation of law. Humankind, he now believes, is irredeemably sinful, and must be restrained by law. As a lawman, his right to enforce order upon everyone else is absolute, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in pursuing that goal. Law is Garret’s goal, not a means.

Kris Kristofferson (left) and James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Here’s where my teenage self reacted with initial revulsion. Raised in an atmosphere of country music, John Wayne movies, and Zane Grey novels, I believed American Western myths of hard-bitten individualism and frontier pluck. Peckinpah chooses the most extreme versions of that mythology: the strict lawman who believes the frontier must be tamed, and the wild-eyed outlaw who glories in the absence of law. The two must fight, and destroy everyone who comes between them.

I failed to understand the context. Peckinpah released this movie in 1973, the same year America’s involvement in Vietnam juddered to an unsatisfying halt. The American myth had devolved into extremes, not dissimilar to those depicted onscreen, and likewise destroyed everything that came between them. Even Bob Dylan’s involvement, as both composer and strange, enigmatic character, served to repudiate the entire previous decade. He’d been reduced to “Alias,” a character with no name or loyalties.

And yes, Peckinpah destroyed every Western stereotype. I saw that correctly, but utterly misinterpreted it. In one memorable scene, veteran cowboy actor Slim Pickens plays a sheriff conscripted into Garrett’s posse. A gunfight ensues, and Pickens is gut-shot. The camera lingers over him trying to hold his entrails in, eyes wide, while his wife tries to comfort him. The iconic Western character is dying, and knows it.

Pickens would parody this trope the next year, in Blazing Saddles.

Unlike in Peckinpah’s earlier films, made when he was relatively sober, these characters have limited motivations. Unlike, say, David Sumner in Straw Dogs, Billy and Garrett don’t learn or change with the story; they simply possess absolute morals, and kill to support them. But like jazz, this movie isn’t about what it’s about. Billy and Garrett don’t learn, but everyone caught between them certainly does. The lessons are cold, and usually final.

I misunderstood this at 17, because my upbringing strictly refused to accept the lessons of the post-Vietnam era. Worse, looking around today, watching my country getting shredded by a similar adherence to absolute morals, I see I wasn’t the only one who didn’t learn. Today’s moralists even use the same cowboy imagery I grew up with. And now, like then, those who follow absolute morals aren’t hurt, but those caught between them are getting killed.

The Fellowship of YEE-HAW!

Bishop O’Connell, Two-Gun Witch

The Elves and their fiercest allies, the Lakota Nation, fought fiercely against the American settlers, but history already records that they lost. Now Talen, one of the Elven nation’s greatest warriors, lives the life of a colonized person. She hunts outlaws for a government that systematically oppresses her people, a paradox she’s all too aware of, thank you very much. So taking another bounty on a White settler doesn’t ruffle her moral feathers. At first.

Bishop O’Connell’s fourth novel reflects two authors whose novels influenced my heady youth: Lloyd Alexander and Zane Grey. Both authors, in their way, wrote about almost-historical lands that sort of existed, but not really, nations of moral clarity and larger-than-life conflicts, where survivors tested their mettle and emerged stronger. O’Connell’s novel treads similar ground, though he updates the moral symmetry for our more fraught times. The product is familiar and strange at the same time.

Talen is a Shadow Warden, a guardian of magical purity for her people. But after the war, when the Elves and Lakota alike were forced onto reservations, Talen bought herself a measure of freedom by becoming a U.S. Marshal, bringing in “the stained,” people whose souls have become so suffused with black magic, they can’t be saved, only killed. In the bleak desert southwest, Talen is terribly effective. This doesn’t save her from racism, though.<

In O’Connell’s telling, the Elves lived in harmony with nature and Indigenous society before White settlers came, partly because fighters like Talen kept evil away. But White society and its technological terrors brought something worse than colonialism: they brought moral complexity. This longing for supposed long-lost virtue is common to both fantasy and Western literature, a belief that people once knew right from wrong. Talen, more than most, understands the difference between “right” and “lawful.”

Though mostly centered in New Mexico, big money tempts Talen to pursue a bounty in the Dakota Territory. A White woman there has supposedly gone stained, leaving a wake of destruction behind. But even before finding her prey, Talen realizes something doesn’t smell right. Her supposedly morally rotten prey is a soft-spoken farm widow who loves horses and doesn’t handle a firearm correctly. Talen suspects she’s been sent after a false bounty for nefarious purposes.

Bishop O’Connell

Unfortunately, Talen isn’t the only half-official lawman pursuing Margaret Jameson. The Red Right Hand, a fanatic religious sect, hates the stained almost as much as it hates Elves and Lakota. And unlike Talen, who remains bound by her people’s unjust treaty with the federal government, the Red Right Hand has official standing. Talen is an accomplished warrior, but that matters little as she finds herself outmanned, outgunned, and fighting a second war against White colonialism.

It possibly isn’t coincidental that Talen’s name resembles Lloyd Alexander’s protagonist, Taran. Both heroes believe naively that they understand the moral implications of the outside world, but leaving their comfort zone, they quickly realize the world is a thicket of compromise and ambiguity. They also both become dependent on friends they didn’t know they had, much less needed. The outside world is a scary, murderous place, after all. Nobody should have to face it alone.

Despite the backward-looking nostalgia common to both Westerns and fantasy, though, there’s a distinctly modern component to O’Connell’s narrative. He populates his frontier America with groups like Elves, Dwarves, Native Americans, and White religious nuts, who all perceive the world in strictly binary terms: everyone believes they’re standing fast against implacable evil. Only when these groups come into friction does anybody realize things are possibly more complex—or that they themselves might not be heroes.

Talen begins the novel thinking that evil is an individual transgression, a single soul tainted by darkness. But Margaret Jameson’s plight forces her to rethink everything she believes. Soon she must gather a fellowship of others like her, survivors who, for various reasons, no longer believe their governments and the official story. In chasing the true source of corruption, they must soon leave their safe wilderness and venture into that darkest of unknown lands: Chicago.

O’Connell’s novel is both a continuation of the fantasy and Western genres, and a subversion. Readers find his initial language and imagery familiar, as genre audiences seek. But then O’Connell subverts genre expectations, not once or twice, but time after time. Each new revelation reveals deeper ways our characters, and therefore we, have believed widespread lies. We finish the book realizing, with Talen and her fellowship, that only one truth is sacred: your own conscience.

Innocence, Experience, and Justice on Netflix

The squadron of pilots from Netflix’s Voltron

Did you ever wonder how the overeducated wanderer’s mind reacts to isolation? As my second week of COVID-induced quarantine drags on, I’m ashamed to confess the quantity of Netflix I’ve consumed. But two titles stand out: Voltron: Legendary Defender, the reboot of the 1980s Americanized anime, and Longmire, based on Wyoming novelist Craig Johnson’s mystery series. They represent two different interpretations of the classic generational conflict.

Voltron starts by loosely retreading the 1980s story: five human teenagers encounter an ancient world dominated by dark magic and arcane technology. Part of this melding is Voltron, a creature half robot, half demigod, controlled by its human pilots. Voltron stands between a just universe, balanced and beneficent in nature, and hungry, conquering evil, embodied in Emperor Zarkon. This Manichaean conflict implies the battle between natural balance and original sin.

In the season one finale, however, an unexpected plot wrinkle emerges: Zarkon, who has conquered unceasingly for ten millennia, was secretly a former Voltron pilot. His conquests have simply displaced his desire to reclaim his status as captain of justice, a desire he’s nursed since before humans began building stone pyramids. While the wet-behind-the-ears human squadron struggles to control their beloved warrior robot, Zarkon’s familiarity with Voltron is chilling.

On Longmire, meanwhile, title character Walt Longmire has served as sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming, for years. He’s manifestly effective, but hidebound, a throwback to frontier justice. Sure, he drinks to numb the pain lingering from his wife’s murder, and sometimes he’ll bloody his knuckles getting confessions from swaggering cowboys; but by nightfall, he’s cornered his suspect, and law always prevails.

Walt’s deputy, Branch Connally, unexpectedly announces an election challenge, believing Longmire is past his prime. Walt and Branch are both White, rugged, and handsome, the before-and-after of cowboy justice. But Branch is clean-shaven and photogenic. Walt is rumpled and stubbly, and always looks like he maybe slept with his Stetson pulled over his eyes. Though largely interchangeable, their generational conflict culminates in a punch-up along a Wyoming gravel road.

These two shows have several important overlaps. Both believe justice exists, and humans should strive to achieve it, though evil forces would pervert it for their own ends. Both believe a judicious application of violence is the most efficient means to achieve justice. They ask similar questions about how much of oneself leaders must sacrifice for the common good. How much can lawkeepers protect themselves while still protecting others from atrocity?

The entire sheriff's department on Longmire

The Voltron Force is defined by their youth. They struggle to control their super-weapon, and one recurring theme throughout the seasons is the incremental gains they achieve in mastering themselves and their skills. Their central opponent, however, has enjoyed power for ten thousand years. In a remarkably solid-state empire, Zarkon has grown to accept power as his due. In his mind, he’s entitled to control the universe’s greatest weapon.

Conversely, Longmire’s defining characteristic is age. He’s earned his scars, studied under previous masters, and, samurai-like, now defends the law as his domain. The show makes clear that Branch Connally is a good deputy, but still has unpaid dues. Even Branch admits he still has lessons Walt could teach, if he weren’t too impatient to learn. Justice, in Longmire’s world, comes from experience and seniority, not youthful ideals.

What’s remarkable is the respective attitudes to change. Voltron’s universe has evolved little over millennia, until young humans, willing to learn, disrupt the rusticating empire. Change, for Voltron, is necessary to unseat fat, entitled evil. For Longmire, change is decline. “I remember when I could count the number of murders in this county on one hand,” Walt growls into his beer, as the body count accumulates. “Two at most.”

In brief, Voltron believes justice comes from uprooting the fat, decrepit entitlements of age. Longmire believes justice comes from preserving the lessons taught by experience. Neither position is absolute: the Voltron Force has older mentors beside them, and takes frequent opportunities to learn from aliens they encounter. Longmire, likewise, requires his upstart deputies’ frequent challenges to maintain his competitive edge. But each has specific attitudes toward youth and age.

These different shows have different audiences, of course, and remind their respective target demographics that society values their contributions. Neither youthful idealism, nor hard-won seniority, is enough to bring justice by themselves. Both also charge their audiences to remember that justice exists, but isn’t passive. We must never forget that seniority can cause corruption, and youth can cause chaos. It’s important to keep up the fight, at any age.

Clint Eastwood's Cowboy Economics

1001 Movies to Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 33
Clint Eastwood (director/star), Pale Rider

For me, the iconic image happens when Preacher (Clint Eastwood) begins sledgehammering a large granite boulder. Hull Barrett (Michael Moriarty) believes there’s untapped gold under the stone, but he cannot reach it without breaking the stone first. And he daren’t drill and blast, he explains, lest he divert the stream the other prospectors depend upon for their meager living. Barrett cannot bear hurting the other prospectors, not even if doing so would make him rich.

Not surprisingly for a movie starring a character known only as Preacher, this movie is replete with Biblical references. Moses, in the book of Exodus, struck a rock at Meribah and opened a stream, saving his people. Likewise, the prospectors of Carbon Canyon, inspired by Preacher’s resistance to the capitalist LaHood and his violent thugs, join him in striking Barrett’s rock; indeed they find gold, which saves the prospectors from destitution. Preacher is apparently Moses.

Capitalist Coy LaHood owns nearly all his domain. He has renamed his town LaHood, and has replaced slow, tedious panning for gold with a hydraulic system. His technology has made him rich, but gradually destroys the land it occupies. Most workers around LaHood have accepted their subjection and work the mines, knowing they’ll never profit much. But why fight it? LaHood bribes state regulators and federal marshals to ensure every conflict breaks in his favor.

The prospectors in Carbon Canyon, by contrast, don’t have bosses. They have legal claim to their smallholdings, provided they stay put. Though they lack a formal hierarchy, Hull Barrett has achieved enough trust and respect that they treat him as unofficial mayor. The prospectors’ relative independence galls LaHood, who longs to control everyone and everything. So he dispatches his employees to destroy their settlement, hoping that will bring them to heel. Instead, they start praying.

Many critics have observed that this movie pinches tropes from multiple prior Westerns. The mysterious stranger who rides in to deliver the oppressed (Shane). The avenging preacher (Heaven With a Gun). Small operators standing fast against a corrupt, thuggish establishment (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Even Eastwood’s own High Plains Drifter. One could make a sport of spotting moments which screenwriters Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack pinch from the great canon of prior Westerns.

But this criticism misses the point. This creative team doesn’t want to open new territory; they’d rather make a point about the present, viewed through a mythologized past. Coy LaHood embodies the violent coercion inherent in unrestricted capitalism. He owns both the lawmakers and the lawkeepers, and fears no consequences for his actions. His money distorts his ethics, making him mercilessly destroy anybody who prevents him making even more money. Lucre is cause and consequence.

Opposite LaHood’s massive, dehumanizing greed, the Carbon Canyon prospectors have a distributed economy based on everyone minding their own patch. As Barrett explains in a moving speech, they aren’t panning for gold to become rich; they’re working to maintain their own patches, put down roots, and become ordinary citizens. LaHood sees money as its own goal; the Carbon Canyon community long for small holdings, distributed power, and family. They’re Distributists, before the term was coined.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting, this movie ignores that the land the prospectors’ land was stolen twice, once from Indians, once from Mexico. It also ignores that, while they pan for gold, nobody’s growing crops or manufacturing goods. Their community couldn’t survive long without more diverse production, and indeed it didn’t; prospector communities quickly dwindled in history, because somebody needed to hoe corn. Like most myths and fables, this one only extends so far.)

This parable of smallness and honesty versus bigness and corruption, remains tearfully relevant because we face this issue today. Anybody who’s tried filing a stolen wages claim against a major corporation recently, or faced an eminent domain claim, knows the system rewards those already well rewarded; to paraphrase Preacher, the system cannot serve God and Mammon. Preacher gets the credit for stopping the corrupt marshal with guns. But the community stops LaHood by standing together.

This movie was one of several Westerns released in 1985. Following the disaster of Heaven’s Gate, which tanked so badly, it destroyed United Artists Pictures, Hollywood became reluctant to touch Western themes. However, as the profligacy of the 1980s, with their cowboy President, became more overwhelming, Hollywood finally returned to the hero cowboy legend. After all, the present is always morally corrupt; from medieval romances to Singing Cowboys, true Virtue always lives in the past.

To Die and Kill in the American West

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 27
Terrence Malick (writer/director), Badlands

Kit Carruthers wants more from life than small-town South Dakota can provide. He’s cultivated a deliberate James Dean image and rebellious swagger, but his town will only provide him work collecting garbage in the late Eisenhower years. One afternoon, he happens upon the much younger Holly Sargis, who shares his big dreams. But Holly’s puritanical white-bread father disapproves of their relationship, so naturally, Kit buys a gun.

It’s hard to find a director more esoteric than Terrence Malick. In the 1970s, he produced two critically acclaimed movies, both considered classics, then simply vanished for twenty years. Though he has re-emerged, and become prolific, his Garbo-like silence has become his trademark; he remains hermetically sealed, communicating with humanity only through his films, which remain acclaimed, though often difficult to watch.

This film, shot independently on a shoestring budget, features two future Hollywood stars. In classic fashion, both play roles much younger than themselves: Martin Sheen, at 33, played Kit Carruthers as 25, while 24-year-old Sissy Spacek playes 15-year-old Holly. Though both actors convincingly play their characters’ ages, both characters have the kind of disappointment and premature aging that often characterizes small-town life. They look simultaneously young, and older than dirt.

Holly watches with remarkable dispassion when Kit shoots her father and torches her house. She neither commits enthusiastically, nor particularly resists; we’re left wondering whether she cares much either way. This becomes their respective characterizations: Kit cares deeply, but mostly about himself, and lashes out at insignificant provocations. Holly cares little, and despite her tender years, already drifts through life resigned to constant disappointment.

The lovers begin a road trip across the American West, constantly accompanied by Kit’s gun. Everything else changes. They steal food, clothing, and cars almost randomly, but the lovers and their gun remain together, an unholy trinity for their own religion. Like traveling evangelists, they visit homes and towns across the Upper Midwest, but they don’t celebrate anything or bring hope. They just kill, because it’s all they have.

Martin Sheen (left) and Sissy Spacek in Badlands

Malick subverts many tropes of movies set in the American West. Rather than glofifying the landscape, he trivializes it; despite the iconic vistas of the Black Hills and the Prairie, he holds focus on the foreground characters, keeping the background fuzzy. To the characters living in it, the landscape isn’t uplifting and honorable, it’s just the world around them, so constant that they can’t see it anymore. It’s bedroom, kitchen, and toilet to them.

Likewise, though American mythology celebrates the renewal created in wide-open spaces, Kit and Holly don’t somehow become, cowboy-like, the real people they’re meant to be. Without civilization to provide form, they become increasingly shapeless, unsure of themselves. They have nobody to talk to but each other, so they increasingly double down on their existing personalities. Kit becomes angrier, more passionate, while Holly becomes taciturn and fatalistic.

These tendencies are amplified because Malick doesn’t use much soundtrack music. Not that there’s none; one of Malick’s trademarks is the use of compositions by Carl Orff, and he samples from Orff’s percussion classic, “Gassenhauer,” so generously that recent recordings sometimes give that piece the parenthetical title “Theme from Badlands”. Yet in moments that cowboy directors would lavish with orchestral score, Malick backs with footfalls, the wind, the car idling.

This creates a stark, austere screen picture that forces viewers to pay close attention to the characters. Without familiar cues to guide our reactions, we simply stare, dumbfounded. Many audiences find this movie difficult to watch; I generally go years between viewings, because Malick’s lack of emotional signposts makes the experience very raw. Unlike, say, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, this movie forces honest, spontaneous reactions, like pulling teeth without anaesthesia.

Malick’s supporting characters make much of young Martin Sheen’s resemblance to James Dean. Sheen himself cultivated this impression, and Malick permitted Sheen remarkable latitude in designing his character mannerisms. Kit genuinely excels at receiving attention; on those few occasions when he and Holly aren’t talking past one another, he becomes likeable and human. But his usual isolation makes his angry side recur; inevitably, he returns to being the killer.

Critics have assumed Malick meant some indictment of white, small-town America’s tendency to beige conformity. But Malick never says anything explicitly. Audiences have to decide what this movie really means, drawing from a palpable lack of clues. Like real life, we have to create meaning ourselves, meaning isn’t handed to us by the creator. That, ultimately, might be Malick’s message: in our most human moments, we’re totally alone.

The Mythical Cowboy Rides Again

1001 Recordings To Hear Before Your iPod Battery Dies, Part 11
Willie Nelson, Red Headed Stranger

A strange, off-kilter recording barnstormed country music’s airwaves in 1975: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” a nearly thirty-year-old song that, somehow, nobody had ever heard of. Roy Acuff and Hank Williams, among others, had recorded the song, without having a hit. Yet somehow, amid the countrypolitan excesses and slick Chet Atkins-produced fluff of the 1970s, a strange, nasally voice that seemingly couldn’t find the beat, turned this forgotten gem into a certifiable phenomenon.

Despite being a lucrative, if largely unknown, songwriter, Willie Nelson based his eighteenth studio album around two songs written by other people: “The Tale of the Red-Headed Stranger,” a factory-written story song from the 1950s, and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” He constructed a story linking these songs together, and recorded the resulting album in just two days. Nobody, Nelson least of all, expected the album to become a hit.

An itinerant cowboy preacher returns home one wind-battered evening to find his wife with another man. Battered by rage, the preacher slays them both, then leaves his life behind. Wandering the horse-and-buggy Wild West, his name and old life forgotten, he struggles with his belief that God has turned His back. Before long, he faces the imminent possibility that he’ll never love anything again, and lose his soul.

The wandering cowboy, the vengeful apostate preacher, the doomed lover adrift in an almost entirely male world: Nelson managed to capture almost every important country music boilerplate while also creating a piece of classic Jungian mythology. The struggles of faith and identity, while wandering in a wilderness hellscape, transcend country music. Nelson calls his failed hero “The Preacher,” but he could be Orpheus or Sir Lancelot. Maybe once, he was.

Nelson had been on country music’s scene for fifteen years without making a name outside Nashville’s Music Row headquarters. He’d written classic songs for Patsy Cline (“Crazy”) and Faron Young (“Hello Walls”), but apart from his sinecure at Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters, he had no status as a musician. With his polyester slacks and demure manner, Rolling Stone writer Chet Flippo supposedly mistook him for an insurance salesman.

Willie Nelson, around the time he
released Red Headed Stranger

For decades, audiences failed to embrace Nelson’s idiosyncratic voice. Then as now, he often sang ahead of or behind the rhythm, reminding us the literal origins of the term “offbeat.” His jangly nylon-string guitar often overwhelmed his demo recordings. Nelson prepared himself for an unglamorous career in country music’s equivalent to Tin Pan Alley, writing songs that others would make famous, his own voice consigned to demos only studios heard.

Struggling for an anchor on what he suspected might be an anchor, he found the answer in a song. Nelson reports that he’d long sung “The Tale of the Red-Headed Stranger” to his children as a lullaby. His then-wife, Connie Koepke, suggested he turn that into an album. Creating a series of linking songs, and a few instrumentals, Nelson turned one song into a Louis L’Amour-like epic of American rootlessness.

Columbia Records let Nelson bring his live band into the studio, an unusual move in Nashville then and now. For all its homespun ideals, many fans don’t realize how tightly controlled and orchestrated much country music actually is. Despite a handful of famous singer-songwriters like Dolly Parton and Kris Kristofferson, country musicians overwhelmingly don’t write their own songs; even fewer play their own instruments.

In contrast to this, Nelson composed this album half-spontaneously, improvising lyrics into a tape recorder while accompanying himself on guitar. The album is approximately half original, half organized around already common Nashville songs. Despite his lackadaisical sound, Nelson also proved himself an accomplished organizer, rehearsing his live band thoroughly before recording began. According to accounts published later, this album took less than two days of studio time.

Nelson also benefited from fortunate timing. Released just as the “outlaw country” movement began, Nelson had a personal champion in Waylon Jennings. When studio executives balked at Nelson’s stripped-down sound and lack of orchestration, Jennings aggressively pitched this album to radio stations, critics, and fans. Apparently, country fans agreed. The album went to number one and was certified gold the next year, remarkably speedy for country back then.

Too bad other musicians didn’t heed Nelson’s call. While the then-dominant “countrypolitan” sound continued its heavily orchestrated direction, and outlaw country became electrified and pop-friendly, even Willie himself couldn’t maintain that austerity; his 1980s recordings were themselves slickly produced. But for one brief moment in 1975, amids slick disco and dancing queens, Willie produced something authentic, something bigger than himself.

Gunslingin' Queen of the Dystopian Frontier

Lyndsay Ely, Gunslinger Girl: A Novel

Serendipity “Pity” Jones has nothing to live for on the Commune. Days are filled with work and patriotism, then she comes home at night to an all-male family that despises her. Rather than face encroaching adulthood on those terms, she and her best friend pull a runner into the technological wasteland of the new American West. But she quickly discovers that, on the outside, a woman’s value matters only by her product in the moment.

Debut author Lindsay Ely combines Pat Frank’s apocalyptic classic Alas, Babylon with Owen Wister’s The Virginian for a product readers will find familiar, if they’ve ever watched Firefly. This is both good and bad. Over the last two decades, frontier sci-fi has become so commonplace, readers can slip into this book like a favorite pair of jammies. It requires little effort to immerse oneself in Ely’s world. But like those jammies, the comfort may be sleep-inducing.

The Second Civil War left the American East controlled by the Confederation of North America. CONA believes in hard work, stability, and order, so it built the Communes. But wartime bioterror left a paucity of fertile women, and Pity’s father sees dollar signs in her uterus. Pity wants more from life. Her late mother, a former Patriot (think “Browncoat”), taught her marksmanship, so she steals Mommy’s guns and heads for the frontier seeking her fortune.

Out there, she quickly loses everything: scroungers loot her goods, murder her friend, and torch her truck. Left with only her guns, Pity falls in with mysterious strangers from Cessation, the last free outpost in America. With nowhere left to go, she follows their lead. Her impeccable aim and recognized beauty make her a desirable commodity in Cessation, where she becomes a star of the Theatre, half Annie Oakley, half circus freak.

Ely’s futuristic setting has high-tech gewgaws, but they aren’t much expounded upon. Audiences will recognize her world from Tatooine, the Eavesdown Docks, or Deep Space Nine: it’s Dodge City with shinier chrome. Cessation’s street violence (which is mostly just mentioned; Pity doesn’t much go outdoors) contrasts with the glamorous but morally odious order enforced by Casimir, the casino/whorehouse/sideshow that rules town. Some science fiction happens, but at heart, this story is a western.

Lyndsay Ely

Frontier myth looms large in American science fiction. Han Solo can get goods into the home territories without Imperial entanglements; Commander Adama plots a course “beyond the red line.” Americans see space as territory ripe for conquest, and even NASA press releases are often redolent of Manifest Destiny. Even YA dystopias from major publishing conglomerates pit suffocating civilization against the pioneering spirit. We’ll all become free, if we leave home, and become willing to kill.

This trend has problems, certainly. HBO’s Westworld used Indians as set dressing; not one Native American character had lines. We see something similar here: the boundary between CONA and Cessation is populated by Dissidents and Scroungers, landless and chased pillar to post by CONA military and paid mercenaries. But like Indians, other characters mostly speak for these oppressed groups; they seldom speak for themselves. Even when it’s their own story they need to tell.

Readers could make a drinking game of recognizing the prior stories which influence Ely’s narrative. Though I’ve mentioned mass-media science fiction franchises, the two stories I see harvested most liberally are Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and Louis L’Amour’s The Quick and the Dead. Both novels, considered classics, feature Easterners needing to quickly unlearn civilized ways to survive beyond the frontier line. That theme, of counter-conformity and bare-knuckle survival, resonates strongly in Ely’s novel.

Ely presents us, essentially, a story of subjugation. Pity could accept her father’s iron-fisted dominion, but she requires autonomy CONA’s patriarchal structure won’t allow. So she flees, only to find the frontier has its own requirements. Cessation offers decadent luxuries (in both the popular and Marxist senses), but Pity quickly learns that, to embrace these luxuries, she must—well, spoilers. Let’s say, whether it’s the comforts of civilization, frontier lawlessness, or whatever, she must conform.

Rereading what I’ve just written, I realize it could sound like I hated this book. Not so. I devoured it in one frenetic weekend, and I can offer the best compliment available from a blue-collar worker: it kept me up past my bedtime. It’s a good story, well-written, with engaging characters and humane plot. Just don’t expect it to change your life, or upend your genre expectations. Take it for a fun story, and it won’t disappoint.

Rabbi of the Wild Frontier

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 12
Robert Aldrich (director), The Frisco Kid

Rabbi Avram Belinski has no business travelling abroad. Having recently finished rabbinical school in Poland (with great difficulty), his superiors have shipped him to America to bury him. But he takes his mission seriously, to help found San Francisco’s first Orthodox synagogue. When the road across America proves perilous, he falls in with Tommy Lillard, a bank robber and relic of the fading Wild West. This mismatched pair learns they need each other to survive.

Critics pooh-poohed this movie upon its 1979 release, dismissing it as harmless, unkempt vehicle for its star, Gene Wilder. Already in his middle forties, Wilder made an unusually aged rabbinical graduate, though the culture clash aspect of his performance, so different from his saddle-weary Blazing Saddles character, received praise. Breakout star Harrison Ford, as Lillard, went largely unremarked at the time. However, it marks a pivotal moment in America’s relationship with its own frontier history.

Rabbi Belinski arrives in Philadelphia laden with ample baggage: ritual garments, traditional temple silver, and a hand-transcribed Torah. Within minutes, though, he finds himself robbed of everything except his precious scroll, beaten senseless and dumped roadside in his long underwear. In the classic Western tradition, he loses everything. Pennsylvania’s storied Amish community nurses him back to health, Belinski’s first encounter with distinctly American culture. Remember, this predates Ford’s star-making turn in Witness by six years!

Losing one’s baggage, literal or metaphorical, looms large in Western literature. Owen Wister’s genre-defining classic The Virginian begins with his nameless hero losing his Back East luggage. The West, in American mythology, strips newcomers of their urban, “feminizing” affectations, making everyone equal. The American West defines us by where we’re headed, not where we come from or what we bring with us. Though reality doesn’t always follow this myth, the story remains important to Americans.

Having made his recovery, but lost his resources, Rabbi Belinski must work his way across America; he quickly finds employment laying railroad track, a job for which he’s supremely unsuited. (As the established star in 1979, Wilder, as Belinski, gets greater screen time than Ford, especially in early scenes. More recent releases, since Ford became a bankable star and Wilder eased toward retirement, have foregrounded Ford’s unshaven cowboy. Realize in advance, this is slightly inaccurate.)

Gene Wilder (left) and Harrison Ford in The Frisco Kid

Ford, as Tommy Lillard, makes his living robbing trains. Superficially, he’s good at his job, cutting a dashing image on rearing horseback. But his hauls are embarrassingly small, and he lives out of his saddlebags, largely spending each day’s spoils that night. His journey frequently overlaps Belinski’s for some time before they actually meet; each inadvertently keeps covering the other’s lapses. Even before they join up, these men plainly complement each other’s respective, profound weaknesses.

Once they meet, Belinski and Lillard struggle to handle one another’s culture. Like countless white settlers before him, Belinski must learn that Eastern urban mannerisms don’t belong out West; he must make bold stands, spit tobacco, and occasionally fight for his beliefs. Lillard, meanwhile, faces a frontier rapidly approaching its close. He must learn culture and build connections with others, because soon enough, his rootless, rapacious lifestyle will have no place in America’s New West.

All this message gets bundled through raucous screwball comedy. Though somebody else plays the Decaying Cowboy role, the story nevertheless presents another angle on the character type Wilder immortalized in Blazing Saddles. Its similar “buddy drama” quality, inverted for laughs, also unpacks characters by showcasing their weaknesses. But it expands upon Blazing Saddles by being even more fiercely Jewish than even Mel Brooks would dare. The motley product is alternately hilarious, pious, humane, and touching.

Almost by definition, the Frontier means occupying an eternal present, where past heritage and future aspirations vanish into savage Mountain Man fantasies. But being Jewish means keeping ancient traditions alive, despite society’s advancing demands. And being American means embracing the continent’s diverse influences: Belinski and Lillard quickly find themselves indebted to various Christian and Native American communities. These two men find themselves changed by each other. But they’re also changed simply by being in America.

That, ultimately, is this movie’s binding theme: that being who you are isn’t good enough, you must also be who you’re becoming. Individually, these characters are unprepared for the changes history forces upon them. Together, they have the ability to grow. Each encourages the other, pushes through the other’s weakness, and brings out the other’s most hilarious potential. Like Blazing Saddles, there’s a serious message here. We just needed a ludicrous comedy to find it.

Cowboy Dinosaur FBI Detective Procedural

Craig Johnson, Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery

Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire doesn’t want this cold case. The most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever uncovered just appeared on a ranch owned by a cantankerous Cheyenne elder. The fossil could net millions for whoever owns it. But who does—the rancher, the Cheyenne Nation, the federal government? When the elder’s body, half-eaten by wildlife, appears on his own ranch, the question becomes dangerously loaded.

Craig Johnson’s thirteenth Longmire novel hits shelves just ahead of the TV adaptation’s fourth season, forthcoming on Netflix. Johnson uses his adopted Wyoming home to exemplify the collision between modern life and traditional ways. Sheriff Longmire is a contemporary Doc Holliday, classically educated (he translates Latin aloud) but also dedicated to classic attitudes of justice and restitution. Sparsely populated northern Wyoming severely tests Longmire’s values.

This time, Longmire doesn’t want this murder investigation. His daughter, a Philadelphia lawyer, is due home with Walt’s newborn granddaughter. Walt’s best friend, Henry Standing Bear, has arranged a Cheyenne naming ceremony, and Walt’s squeeze Victoria “Vic” Moretti, who doubles as his daughter’s sister-in-law (um…), is showing nesting tendencies. All this is amplified because Walt and Vic suffered significant trauma in the last novel.

Nevertheless, Walt, Vic, and a cast of diverse prairie personalities find themselves thrust into a difficult situation. The massive, newly discovered fossil brings national, and even international, interest into Absaroka County. A newly appointed U.S. Attorney with outsized ambitions dragoons Longmire into his PR campaign, while the FBI and Cheyenne tribal police inject their own desires. Plus, it’s summer in Wyoming, which means storms, including hail large enough to kill.

Johnson’s fans have long admired his ability to invent complex characters and inject them into fraught situations. He demonstrates great aplomb in creating dialog among laconic people who dispense words with Protestant thrift: “ How ’bout I go in there and kick his skinny ass like a rented mule?” Having lived in America’s prairie heartland for twenty-three years, I can easily imagine slow-talking people with nose-first accents really talking this way.

Craig Johnson

But it isn’t just about characters. Unlike conventional mysteries set in close-packed environs like Manhattan or L.A., Wyoming presents entirely distinct challenges based on its sprawling geography. As Longmire stresses early, Absaroka County covers territory larger than New Hampshire, meaning truly determined malefactors can disappear altogether. The land is crisscrossed with mines, caves, shacks, and unmapped canyons untouched in a century.

Danny Lone Elk ruled his ranch with iron discipline. Between his swift punishments and his chronic alcoholism, there aren’t many tears shed among his family upon his death. However, he apparently knew about Jen, the Tyrannosaurus fossil, and hoped for… something. Hard to say what, since evidence of his handshake arrangement with local paleontologists remains mysterious, and as his own only witness, his death scatters all arrangements wildly.

These paleontologists, incidentally, aren’t scientifically detached. One apparently used Danny Lone Elk’s naivete to arrange a lopsided agreement for fossil extraction; the other, a longtime Wyoming character, has strangely friendly arrangements with the family her colleague tried to bilk. When they attempt to ship Jen’s enormous head out of state UPS, Walt finds himself storing sixty-million-year-old rocks in county holding cells.

Gripping though the mystery is, readers will stick with Craig Johnson for his intense sense of place. Longmire’s Wyoming, like most American prairie communities today, straddles the willful dedication to tradition, and modernity’s implacable march. Absaroka County’s people combine native country dwellers and fugitives from urban America’s impersonality. The blend creates a cauldron of ever-evolving ethical collision.

Comparisons with traditional Western literature comes naturally with Johnson’s novels. Besides his central protagonists, his supporting cast of thousands comprises the kind of Blazing Saddles-ish personalities that flourish wherever territory exceeds population. The cowboy-hatted sheriff’s precarious relationship with local Indian officials reflects two cultures’ incompatible claims on the same land and heritage. Absaroka County is truly the frontier.

This, though, isn’t some anomalous period piece. Longmire’s Wyoming exists one connecting flight away from America’s largest cities. Very modern urban tragedies can intrude on Longmire’s time capsule world instantaneously. And his stern commitment to justice has earned Longmire foes among Mexico’s most high-tech drug cartels—foes whose ability to surround and savage him isn’t circumscribed by Western notions of distance and isolation.

Johnson deftly combines character drama with procedural mystery, modern genre fiction with classic Western values. His longtime fans already know this. His thirteenth novel rewards loyal fans by expanding his beloved characters and their continuing backstory. But it also invites first-time readers to jump aboard this charging train.