Customer Reviews

Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (Castle Lectures Series)

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Well, Robert Pippin does a pretty thorough job of analyzing three major Westerns that came out of Hollywood, Howard Hawks' "Red River", a kind of "Mutiny on the Bounty"; John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence", in which a political career is founded on a lie; and Ford's "The Searchers", which might have been called "What's The Matter With John Wayne Today."

Pippin is a philosopher of note, with a named chair, specializing in such lightweight German thinkers as Hegel and Nietzsche. It's surprising to find that he's able to cover relatively conventional Western movies in as much detail as he does? (Where does he find the time?) He dismisses the B Westerns full of stereotypical heroes and villains but believes that the more ambitious examples of the genre have something to teach us. He's certainly convinced me. Pippin hasn't just watched the three movies and taken notes in the dark. (He throws in a sketch of Nicholas Ray's "The Lusty Men" as a kind of bonus.) He cites some important theoretical literature on movies as well -- Bazin, say, and Warshow and Kitses; and he's not above allusions to theorists in anthropology either, like Levi-Strauss, and that's my field.

I applaud his way of getting directly to the point, when he's not skirting around it. Why, at the end of "The Searchers", does Ethan pick up Debby and cradle her in his arms rather than shoot her dead? Ford's original script had such a tragic scene written in it, and Ford scotched it. Pippin outlines half a dozen or so possible answers without resolving the question he's posed. All the explanations have some plausibility and all may feed into the common channel that produced the events we see on screen but none is itself sufficient. That's ambiguity of a particularly rich sort.

For what it's worth, Pippin's analysis of "The Searchers" suggests that Ford deliberately set us up for a typical John Wayne character, then knee-capped our expectations with enough subtlety that, without thinking about it, we are still able to cast Ethan as a straightforward hero of the old school. The problem with the common public interpretation -- Wayne as hero -- is that we have to do a lot of mental work to "not think about it." The evidence of Wayne's brutality and self hatred is everywhere in the film. He's an outright racist, for instance. Yes, the butchery of his brother and family intensifies his bitterness, but he was a racist BEFORE he had that excuse. He dislikes his companion, Jeffrey Hunter, for being one eighth Cherokee. "A fella could mistake you for a breed." He wears the remnants of a Confederate uniform. He carries fresh gold coins without explaining where they came from. He chooses to ride off and kill Comanche raiders rather than stay and protect the woman he loves. He goes berserk and kills as many buffalo as possible. He shoots three men in the back. He shoots the eyes out of an Indian corpse. He scalps a Comanche's dead body. He's willing to kill Hunter in order to get at Debby. Until the climax, he's thoroughly committed to killing his own innocent niece because she's been with the Indians who kidnapped her as a child.

Nor, with the exception of Jeffrey Hunter, does the Western community oppose his murderous intentions. Even the virginal, desperate-to-be-married Lauri, played by Vera Miles, angrily tells Hunter not to interfere with Ethan's plans to murder his niece. Let Ethan "put a bullet through her head" because Debby is just "the leavings of some buck." In the end, when Ethan brings Debby back, the community shuts him out. They don't scorn him. They just forget about him and he wanders off thankless.

I enjoyed Pippin's analysis of the three films. I was hoping to learn a bit more about philosophy than I did. As a philosophical ignoramus I needed a better understanding of how political philosophy provides a template for our grasp of the issues involved. (Most of the philosophical stuff shows up in the end notes, without much in the way of description.) The first encounter with Carl Schmitt is parenthetical -- something is described as "even Schmittian." Well, who is Carl Schmitt? I never heard of him. By the end of the book I had the crudest idea. It would have been useful if Pippin had stopped at the first mention of Schmitt (and the dozen other philosophers he alludes to, like Rawls and Nuzick, and given us a brief, relevant sketch of their ideas and their application to the films under scrutiny -- a kind of Kindergarten, A, B, C, approach. And, given my own background, I would have thought that Max Weber's typology of authority -- traditional, charismatic, and rational/legal -- might have gotten more attention, though, granted, they don't have much to do with the mythology behind the founding of a society.

My advice to those considering this book is to forget about philosophy and treat the book as an insightful analysis of three noteworthy and ambitious films that treat the founder myths necessary in keeping us together in a community, despite the rifts in that community. Did you know that George Washington chopped down the cherry tree and confessed, "I did it"? (He didn't.) Maybe "mythos" would have been a more apt analytical tool -- the alpha stories that explain how this nation of ours got started, regardless of the ratio of fact to fiction.