As promised, here is the multimedia near-final draft of my paper:

“The Fine Good Place to Be”: Eden, the Other, and Illusion in the American Western


25th Hour

At the end of Spike Lee’s 2002 film 25th Hour, a convicted drug dealer named Monty (Edward Norton) is in a car with his father (Brian Cox) behind the wheel. They are on the freeway, heading towards prison so that Monty can begin his seven year sentence. Monty’s father suggests that they could take a different route, and head west instead. At this point Monty’s father begins an extraordinary narration, outlining in detail how Monty can start his life again and regain his lost innocence. Lee visually accompanies this narration with a literalism that only the movies can offer, and he makes this dream a reality by showing it to us, by giving it life on the screen. “This is a beautiful country,” Cox intones. The images Lee offers depict a West that is thoroughly conquered and domesticated. Lee goes for the iconic: white picket fences, friendly small town bars. He pushes this dream to the edge of absurdity, while underlining both its beauty and impossibility. Charles Taylor writes that the film “climaxes with a dream that has so much emotional conviction, so much faith in the possibility of still being able to live a good life in America, that you’d have to be a complete cynic to think he’s putting one over on us. The movie is both a lament for the chances at a good life that we—individually and as a nation—have let slide and a profession of thanks for the chances that still exist” (Taylor 1). 25th Hour engages with the American Myth of conquest in these final scenes, but the West that Lee depicts is one with a clean slate. It is a place that is willing to forget history, and it is a place that is outside time, in the hour of the film’s title. It offers salvation, a utopia that erases the scars and reckonings of the past.

The typical Hollywood Western narrates the creation of this new Eden. The visual motifs of the Western (arid empty deserts, virgin plains, wide open spaces) present an environment that is unblemished by civilization. In these films the American West is presented as an exception to the fallen world. So where, then, is the Indian? He is absent, mostly. The concept of the West as virgin territory clashes with the knowledge that the Indian was there for thousands of years. This paradox is not resolved in the Hollywood Western, but even so it informs the Western’s foundational ideologies.

I wish to argue that one role of the Indian in the Hollywood Western is that of history. Among other things, the desperate fight to eliminate the Indian dramatizes the desire of white settlers to escape from history into a utopia characterized most often by domestic bliss. There is no place for the Indian in the New World, precisely because for him it is the Old World. As the horrifying justification for this genocide goes, “the Indian hindered progress.”
Historically, even before Hegel, utopia has been associated with the end of history. It has always existed outside of time. In most modern utopian (or, for that matter, dystopian) fiction, history must be disposed of, or escaped from, in order to arrive at utopia, which is at the end of history, and therefore outside of time. Apart from typical utopian narratives, the Western does not present a society already outside of time (although many begin with a depiction of a domestic utopia before the conflict with history begins), but instead it narrates the elimination of history in the form of the Indian. And while the Western may present a fallen world, a world caught in history, the happy ending dictated by the studios always results in a restored Eden, with history thoroughly disposed of. Armando Prats writes, “Closure, the canonical Western would have it, implies the closing of the frontier and the concomitant opening of the Edenic gates” (221).


The Stalking Moon

Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon (1969) presents in stark terms the formation of the new Eden and the flight from history. Eva Marie Saint plays Sarah Carver, a blonde captive of Indians who is suddenly free at the start of the film. (Often in parallel to the restoration of Eden, a fallen woman is redeemed.) Her English is minimal, and she has a young Indian son. The boy’s father, named Salvaje, is still alive and she knows he will come to claim his son. She begs Sam Varner (Gregory Peck) to take her and the boy with him so that she may escape. Varner takes her and the boy to his home in New Mexico, and here begins their confrontation with history.

It is up to Varner to redeem Sarah and the boy. Salvaje, which, significantly, means “savage” in Spanish, soon arrives to terrorize the newly formed nuclear family. It is most interesting that it is the boy who is the object of this conflict. He is the object of conflicting claims of the past and the utopian future. In some ways, Salvaje’s claim on the boy represents a personal claim on the future, but in the context of the Western his claim becomes one of history. The future, inevitably, belongs to Sam and Sarah, and Salvaje’s persistence in attempting to regain the boy represents the stubborn hold of history on the couple. The boy, then, is the conflicted figure, the only character (other than perhaps the “half-breed” Nick) who is stuck between these competing claims. The boy has little agency, however, and Sam and Salvaje attempt to make the decision for him. Significantly, Sam must venture outside of his domestic fortress in order to confront Salvjaje. By doing so he enacts yet another standard Western motif: the hero who confronts history in order to destroy it. When Varner finally kills Salvaje, a man given almost metaphysical presence and power in the film, he finally makes possible utopia. The claim of history on the boy is destroyed.

The fact that the conflicted figure, the figure caught between history and utopia, is half Indian in The Stalking Moon is not an anomaly. The racially mixed identity provides the internal conflict of which the Western makes its true subject. The wholly white figures are always on the side of utopia, and the wholly Indian figures that of history. The character of mixed identity personifies the utopian struggle of the Western. Two other films, John Ford’s The Searchers and the The Unforgiven, are concerned with racially mixed individuals and the claim of the past. But it is, of course, The Searchers which engages this idea with the most complexity.


The Searchers

For the sake of space, an analysis of The Searchers in this context must be restricted to the suggestive and complex final scenes. The film tells the story of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne). Ethan is a man ‘caught between,’ and the script details his possessions as a Confederate overcoat, Yankee cavalry trousers, and a Mexican saddle (6). He is obviously a man of conflicted identities, and therefore he is a man that is preeminently American. He is significantly the most “Indian” of Hollywood Western heroes. He knows them, their language, and their customs as well as they do. This is demonstrated when Ethan shoots out the eyes of a dead Indian, forcing his spirit to “wander forever between the winds.” The depth of his knowledge is show to be a reflection of the depth of his hate.

Like many Westerns, the opening scenes of The Searchers present a domestic utopia, eerily placed in the middle of nowhere. This doesn’t last, however, and the restoration plot is set in motion when the Edward’s place is attacked by Indians while Ethan is away. Ethan’s brother and his entire family is killed, except the little girl, Debbie. Ethan vows to bring her back, and he is assisted by Martin Pauley, who is one eighth Indian. The search takes many years, however, and Ethan’s intentions regarding Debbie become increasingly suspect. When he finally encounters her, in the Indian chief Scar’s tent, she is presenting a row of scalps, the symbol of Indian savagery. He attempts to kill her but Martin prevents him.

This relatively simple plot climaxes in scenes of such complexity and emotional power that they are unmatched in American film. Ethan’s final confrontation with Debbie, with all the attendant complexities and ambiguities, has more to say about America’s identity and destiny than perhaps any other work of art made in this century, and the film’s ability to resist definitive interpretation is an important part of this quality. That being said, the final scenes must be understood through Ethan’s earlier thwarted attempt to kill Debbie, who he believes has turned irretrievably Indian. In the final confrontation, in that moment of indecision, when Ethan lifts Debbie into the air, rests the heart of the film, and in some ways it stays there. When Ethan finally brings her down, a gesture signifying his decision to bring her home, he has not changed his mind about her being “Comanche,” and there is no evidence to suggest that she turns white at that moment either.

So why, then, does he not kill her? Far more than an audience satisfying happy ending, it is moving reckoning with the American dream as imagined by the Western, and in some ways a eulogy for it. Ethan’s gesture operates, at the same time, as both a redemption for the fallen women and an acceptance that utopia is impossible. To explain: Debbie’s capture represents the Fall in the sense that the domestic utopia presented at the start of the film is destroyed, and the search undertaken to find her is an attempt to restore what is left of that utopia. In this sense, the title refers to a search for salvation as much as a search for a missing girl. Debbie, like the boy in The Stalking Moon, becomes, over time, the conflicted figure. She is between cultures, and so she represents the conflict between the dream of utopia and history. Furthermore, Ethan’s declaration that she has turned “Indian” is to be trusted, the film and Ethan both make that clear. History has won the conflict in Debbie, and so Ethan determines that she must be destroyed because utopia must exist outside history. It is also significant that Debbie, a child at the start of the film, has grown to be a young woman by the end, further demonstrating the death of possibility that Ethan sees in her.

Yet, instead of destroying her, Ethan “redeems” her and returns her to the Jorgenson family. This can only be interpreted as an act of resignation. Ethan gives up on utopia when he decides to spare Debbie’s life. The final scenes at the Jorgenson place reflect this: The admission of Debbie (who says not a word) into the home is for Ethan an admission of failure. The family seems ready to forget the truth of what Debbie represents, but the audience must ask themselves: what is being created here? I believe it is a false utopia. It is one not unlike the dream proposed by Monty’s father in 25th Hour, one which, precisely because of its denial of history, is impossible. The famous and moving final scene, which depicts Ethan alone, locked out from this seeming domestic paradise, comes to represent the death of the true possibility of utopia while at the same time representing how that dream continues to flourish. There is no place for Ethan in the home because of his demand for purity. His distrust of the one-eighth Indian Martin stresses this. Ethan, then, banished and alone, is the utopian dream fully represented in its fanaticism and determination. His role in the West, the construction of utopia, is a relic of a dream that has died in Debbie. The true utopia has passed away in her, and all that is left is the illusion embraced by the Jorgensens. In this way the film operates as a eulogy for an impossible dream. And it is to the film’s credit that the utopian dream is represented honestly as hateful and destructive, yet it is still mourned. Like perhaps no other film, The Searcher is a reckoning with the deepest character of America.

The racially conflicted character and history surface again in John Huston’s The Unforgiven. The religious character of the title appropriately suggests a failure to attain salvation, and it stresses the impossibility of an escape from history. The story is essentially a reverse captivity narrative, and it offers an interesting appendix to The Searchers if one wonders what will become of Debbie and the Jorgensens. Rachel (played, tellingly, by white-as-can-be Audrey Hepburn) is an Indian who believes she is white. She has been raised by a white family, the Zacharys, who have never revealed the truth to her. Much like the boy in The Stalking Moon, much like Debbie in The Searchers, her Indianness must be erased or ignored in order for the family to escape from history and establish utopia. And much like The Stalking Moon, the defense of utopia against history, rather than the (failed) restoration of a lost utopia in The Searchers, forms the narrative.


The Unforgiven

History itself takes physical form in Abe Kelsey, “the Texas Tiresias doubling as Aeschylean Fury,” (Prats 111) who brings the past back to the Zacharys. Because of him, Rachel is found out. The mother figure, played by none other than Lillian Gish, has known all along, but, like the Jorgensens, she prefers to maintain the illusion because Rachel serves as a replacement for a lost child. After further plot developments, and after Rachel begins to question her own identity by marking herself like an Indian (a scarlet letter of sorts—the mark of a fallen woman) history comes to claim Rachel. After a protracted battle, Rachel confronts her past in the form of her Indian brother. This extraordinary scene ends with Rachel denying her past by shooting her brother. While the title may refer to the Zachary’s permanent ontological state, Rachel shows the determination they bring to maintaining the illusion of a domestic tranquility that is outside history.

25th Hour opens with several shots of the ghostly lights that replaced the Twin Towers for a time, about six months after they were destroyed. The astounding power of this scene derives not simply from the still fresh emotions associated with those events, but with the feeling that, in the context of the film, those lights represent both a presence and an absence. While the lights beam up infinitely into the universe, they lack substance, and, while beautiful, they can’t replace the real thing. Like the Westerns discussed here, those lights represent the enduring power of the myth of the American dream. And like all art, they represent a mournful reckoning with a fallen world through illusion.