Hundreds of films and television series were produced in the middle of the twentieth century on the theme of the lone gunman saving a town. An isolated frontier town is in trouble, usually from marauders who are stealing cattle and menacing women and children. A rugged, handsome hero rides in and saves the town.
The variations are endless. The troublemakers may be from the town or from outside. They are often nonwhite and the town primarily white, with a few people of color scattered in. The leadership of the town, usually white men, are ineffective or injured. The hero is white and may, as in the case of the Lone Ranger, have a nonwhite sidekick. He may become romantically involved with one of the women of the town, but he seldom stays. The narrative is gendered and racialized.
Such plots were particularly popular through the 1950s. The 1960s brought a degree of revisionism and a darker cast to the plots as contemporary society changed.
The time of the lone gunman was the time of the formative years of many of the men in the Trump administration, and Donald Trump himself. Every week The Lone Ranger saved another town and rode off into the sunset, accompanied by his faithful scout Tonto. The ads showed the Marlboro Man, alone and smoking.
Trump used this narrative to sell himself. Things were terrible in the United States – crime was rampant, other countries had stolen our jobs and were laughing at us, coal was dying. But “I alone can fix it!” Trump’s description of the United States was a lie, of course, but it was necessary to set up the lone gunman narrative.
Trump has tried his best to remain that lone gunman. He has gutted the State Department and left other agencies short-staffed because “I’m the only one that matters.” Quite a few women are not playing their proper roles of admiration, with Melania giving a lot of side eye, Ivanka having more or less vanished, and sex workers uncovering his past. The sex workers in particular were supposed to have hearts of gold. Women at his campaign-like rallies still shout their joy at having him in town, however.
The Mexicans are not tossing their blankets over their shoulders as they stand up and saying “Si, senor” to Trump’s desire to build the wall to keep them in their part of town. And there are guys with stars on their lapels who aren’t cooperating either.
Rex Tillerson is one of the many old white men in the Trump administration who seem to be playing the lone gunman in their minds. Here is how Ronan Farrow describes him:
In that meeting, in January, Tillerson was wearing a charcoal suit and a canary-yellow tie, patterned with horseshoes. He was sitting, legs crossed, in one of the blue-and-gold upholstered chairs in the Secretary’s office. Tillerson had redecorated, replacing the portraits of dead diplomats with scenes of the American West. He got compared to a cowboy a lot, and, between the décor and the horseshoes, he appeared to be leaning into it. The name helped: Rex Wayne Tillerson, after Rex Allen and John Wayne, the actors behind some of Hollywood’s most indelible swaggering cowboys.
We can add his Texas accent to that.
Partaking of the narrative are Steve Bannon, whose trusty steed is ideology; Ben Carson, a famous doctor who rides into town to make people’s lives better; Scott Pruitt, whose extreme effectiveness makes him a target of bad guys everywhere. James Comey, too, sees himself as the lawman armed with integrity and righteousness and destined to save this town.
The fantasy is related to the belief that “only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.” This is no more true that Trump’s view of a badly damaged United States, but it helps some men to feel that they have retained a role of protector of women and society, the lone gunman. This weekend, that fantasy was upended once again, when an unarmed man stopped a gunman in Tennessee.
Many voters want to believe Trump’s narrative of himself as the lone gunman who will fix Washington. Narratives like this, embedded since childhood, are powerful and Trump knows how to use them to build his support. But they are of little use for making the things happen that constitute governing.
Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.
aimai
Gorgeous post. And very, very, true.
Emma
It’s more than just governing in the broader sense. It’s that narrative that every person of color, every woman, every gay or transgendered person has to battle every day in a million small ways meant to diminish our presence and our power.
Corner Stone
As a fellow Pantsless-American, let me just say that I denounce and renounce all acts of violence committed by other Americans who may not have pants on.
Nicole
I thought this was going to be about the lone gunman in Nashville who walked into a Waffle House, naked from the waist down, carrying an assault rifle, and killed four people before someone wrestled the gun away from him. Thank you for bringing it all home at the end.
Yes, it’s like the entire Trump Administration summed up in one horrible tragedy.
Corner Stone
I think one of the more insidious aspects of the Trump admin is that he is such a faithless and bad actor that he continually makes others he mistreats around him seem more sympathetic. I don’t mean I have any sympathy for Sessions, Rex or Comey or McMaster or Tom Price or Reince or etc. In the struggle it’s almost like you *have* to somehow reconcile that, “No, I have NFTG about Comey et al. But given the loathsome creature they are being abused by, I guess seeing them score points on the board could be good.”
Mary G
@Nicole: The guy who wrestled the gun away is black, and the reason he was successful is that the shooter had to reload. The Parkland kids are all over this pointing out the NRA’s silence, because the situation doesn’t fit the script. The lone gunman must be white.
Corner Stone
It’s also why he wants to back out of all multi-party deals and “negotiate” bilateral deals. He can’t understand complex interactions and it’s too difficult to judge a “win” with multiple parties involved. So he’d rather try to bully a smaller trading partner one on one because he can then claim a win, no matter what the outcome is. And he would be the lone savior of the US by getting “us” a better deal.
NotMax
In the mythos, Tonto was presented as the Lone Ranger’s companion, not his scout. Scout was the name of Tonto’s horse.
Brachiator
Very provocative post. You might also say that Trump acts like those autocrats who proclaim their reign to be Year Zero, and that everything that came before is null and void.
His gutting of the State Department really looks large, because I think he will totally discount institutional foreign policy memory, good and bad, in his upcoming meetings with North Korea. I don’t even know if he is paying attention to military intelligence, or how Pompeo used intelligence staff in preparation for his talks with North Korea leadership.
debbie
And if they still believe this after a year of Trump, they are lost forever.
HinTN
@Mary G:
The person of interest pictured in the article is, indeed, white.
raven
what you mean “we”
StringOnAStick
Funny you mention the name thing about Tillerson, I have a similar story. The family lore is that my parents were trying to watch the remaining minutes of Gunsmoke when it was clear Mom was going into labor; they barely made it to the hospital in time because of that. My given name is something typical for that era, but I was always called “Kitty” after the madam/hooker with a heart of gold in that show, Miss Kitty. WT everlovin’ F would you name your daughter after a TV madame? Once I hit 18 I changed that name by slicing off the last T and the Y, and they’re still sad that I did that. Seriously. My parents are RW idiots though so no surprise; it was on TV, how can it be wrong?
schrodingers_cat
The Lone Gunman is an American myth, not a universal one.
geg6
@Mary G:
Ding, ding, ding! Got it in one! Another poor put-upon white guy with economic anxiety.
I hate cowboy movies and always have. That is why I have always adored Blazing Saddles from the moment I first saw it, stoned as hell, in a theater while on a date back in 1974. So awesome.
Cheryl Rofer
@NotMax: You are correct, but I think I’ll leave it the way it is for now.
StringOnAStick
Cheryl, back in the 1980’s I went to an anti-Contra’s presentation by an ex-CIA guy, John Stockman. After expressing regret for a lot of his work (“Angola was my baby”), a lot of what he had to say was exactly what you’ve written here, that we are conditioned from birth by a media narrative that only we are the good guy, the lone good guy, the one sainted by American Exceptionalism. It really opened my eyes to how social mythology can be seriously toxic at much higher levels that we realize. He said he first twigged to the fact it was in everything by watching Saturday morning cartoons with his kid, then once seen, it could not be unseen.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@HinTN: She’s talking about the Heroic Lone Gunman. To be Heroic, he must be white.
Miss Bianca
@geg6: i have shared with Adam S, among others, my theory that “Blazing Saddles” is, in fact, a documentary on race relations in America masquerading as a slapstick comedy.
Corner Stone
@schrodingers_cat:
Even though there is obviously more than a Lone one, isn’t Seven Samurai essentially part of the same mythos? A few formerly Lone who come together to defeat many bad guys?
Skepticat
I’ve always felt that the Wild West mentality as a whole has a great deal to do with the gun culture in the States.
Mark
Marshall Dillon smoked a bad guy almost every week for around 20 years. Lucas McCain used to dispense justice out of the barrel of his rifle in his small New Mexico town on a regular basis. The list of good guys is a long one.
Cheryl Rofer
@StringOnAStick: Good point. It does extend to American foreign relations in that way. Look at how Trump is reacting to the idea of a North Korea summit.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Corner Stone: Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were both heavily influenced by American Westerns.
Yutsano
@Miss Bianca: If you look carefully at his movies, you will see just how much Mel Brooks is a social critic on top of being one of the funniest movie makers Hollywood has ever caught up. Remember: only jesters could mock the king. Most did it with unpleasant truths.
Brachiator
@Corner Stone:
The Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven. Yojimbo became A Fistful of Dollars.
ETA. The original title of Seven Samurai was The Magnificent Seven.
Corner Stone
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Hmmm. I thought Magnificent Seven was an adaptation of SS. And that SS was from a Japanese legend? I could have that all wrong as I have never looked too deeply into it.
JPL
The Lone Ranger belief permeates our society. As much as some on the right want to blame movies and videos, it’s our cowboy and indian mentality that makes us different. At least that’s how I feel. We have glorified the heroes in movies and shows.
@Nicole: Trump will tweet about his heroism, after …………………………….
Corner Stone
@Yutsano:
History of The World: Part I isn’t exactly subtle.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: @Corner Stone: Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Zatoichi, Perceval and his quest for the grail on behalf of king and kingdom, Gilgamesh, Theseus, Perseus…
I can go on if you like. The weaponry may be different from culture to culture and time period to time period, but the myth of a savior – whether mundane or supernatural – seems to be a constant.
Miss Bianca
@Skepticat: And the irony is that when you delve into the history, the “Wild West” actually turned into a gun-free zone in the towns – there were signs posted on the dge of town and in the saloons, etc that you were supposed to surrender your sidearms to the sheriff or other authority while you were there. Funny how *that* side of things never gets portrayed in the Westerns.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
I’d disagree somewhat, because a lot of Seven Samurai is about how the hired samurai organize and motivate the villagers to work together to repel the bandits. It’s all a big team effort.
What is eye-opening is the comparison to The Magnificent Seven, in which all that is thrown out in service to the “lone gunman” ideology. The Mexican villagers are portrayed as abject wusses, completely dependent on their macho gunslinging saviors.
Aleta
And then there’s Zinke. Emails arranging the ad campaign for him on social media that produced a couple of photos of Zinke and a cowboy hat sitting on a Park Service horse, many headlines about how he rode
into townto work, and a cancelled interview with him and the horse on Fox news.And then there’s Pence.
–Graham Gremore in Queerty
https://www.queerty.com/mike-pence-tweets-wants-horse-inside-internet-freaks-20170515
And who could ever forget that guy who confused a horse as he went downhill to vote for himself, lose and then sink from view.
Adam L Silverman
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: The central character in Yojimbo and Sanjuro – the scruffy samurai – is roughly based on Musashi. So the stories may themselves have some borrowed concepts, by the time they were made Musashi had a legendary status in Japan.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: I can neither confirm nor deny that this conversation took place. Also, I was never here.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman: I’m gonna disagree on the original Parzival story, by Wolfram of Eschenbach. But that’s a very long post in itself. I won’t disagree too strongly with regard to the versions modified by the Cistertians and Mallory.
raven
raven
@Miss Bianca: What was you first clue?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiUdtxe2YnU
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Corner Stone: Seven Samurai started from a historical story, but the individual characters and some of the scenes were borrowed from/inspired by the Ford Westerns.
Ruckus
I used to watch a lot of those westerns, when I was a child. Something didn’t ring true about them but I didn’t know what it was, when I was a child. As I got just a bit older I figured it out. The lone ranger was an aberration. It is an extremely rare human that does much alone. One can’t make the tools, use the tools and fight the rest of the world at the same time and all the while growing/raising food. It looked good in the western, except for of course having no food or water for all those miles in the hot sun. We are like most animals, we have to work together to survive. And someone will shoot the asshole in the back if they feel they have to for that survival. And it helps to be able to work together if one doesn’t work full time at being an asshole. Which has been of course, drumpf’s entire life.
Adam L Silverman
@Corner Stone: The Seven Samurai is somewhat of an adaptation of the Ako Incident, better known as the 47 Ronin. A ronin is a masterless samurai. The Ako Incident was fictionalized as the Chusingura. It was both retold in embellished novels and recounted in fictionalized and embellished stage plays. The official account was recorded shortly after Asano Naganori’s retainers avenged his death rather than take their own lives as required by the codes of Bu. Given it is a fictionalized, derivation the Seven Samurai fits within the Chusingura genre.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack:
All I know about Seven Samurai is from watching Three Amigos repeatedly.
“Sew, very old one! Sew like the wind!”
Amir Khalid
The Lone Ranger and Tonto in my head are not the uncomplicated hero and sidekick played by Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels, but the naive fool played by Armie Hammer and the Shakespearean Fool tormented by survivor’s guilt played by Johnny Depp. Trump strikes me as something different from either conception of The Lone Ranger: an attempt to fuse Mundungus Fletcher, Tony Soprano, and Zaphod Beeblebrox, which (needless to say) doesn’t look like succeeding.
CarolDuhart2
It also explains the anger at everyone else. We aren’t playing according to script, are we? We aren’t going away. In the old movies, native americans, natives and other strangers ran away at the sight of Matt Dillon. We were supposed to skulk after Trump came to town. Instead we are protesting and defying him.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: No argument there.
Fair Economist
It’s so ridiculous that the Lone Ranger wears a mask while traveling with an unmasked companion. It’s like the writers didn’t think Amerindians were real people.
raven
@Ruckus: Remember Corriganville?
patrick II
In opposition to the american myth where the lone gunman wins out there are two fairly recent movies from asia based on their myths, not ours — “47 Ronin” and “Hero”.
Both movies ended badly for the lone “gunman” or in their case swordsman and their friends. In 47 Ronin, after a fight against an evil Lord 46 of the 47 Ronin committed suicide because while their fight against the evil lord may have been justified they acted against the wishes of the emperor, and therefore committed ritual seppuku because of their disobedience at the end of the movie.
In “Hero” Jet Li finally confronts what he has considered the evil emperor at the end of the movie — after fighting and killing numerous people including friends to get the opportunity to be alone with the emperor with a chance to kill him. The emperor realizes that Li is about to kill him and explains to Li that all the people the emperor has killed has been for the greater good of China, and Li, realizing the truth of the emperor’s statement, does not kill him.
In both of these non-american myths, the hero may have temporary victories, but in the end it is for the common good that he must sacrifice himself. Both of these endings seemed viscerally very strange to me when I saw the movies, but then I grew up in America where the lone gunman wins and then (if he wants) gets the girl.
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: What’s really interesting, and, perhaps, somewhat sad in the adaptation, is that there is a historical inspiration for the Lone Ranger: US Marshall Bass Reeves. This is Bass Reeves:
http://www.stmuhistorymedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/featureimage.png
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Adam L Silverman: Yes, but you can’t really disentangle the movies from their American influences any more than you can disentangle Ran from King Lear.
I’d go along with arguing the stories about Musashi as a counterpoint to the claim that the lone savior is an American thing. I just think there’s too much cross-pollination to make the same claim for Kurosawa’s movies.
JMG
@Miss Bianca: The trope of the hero sheriff (lone gunman with the approval of the community) taking the first step towards cleaning up the lawless town by banning guns has been used in dozens of Western movies. If you want to see the basis of the American gun fetish in film, “Birth of a Nation” is more to the point than, say “High Noon.”
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: there’s at least one good biography out there of Bass Reeves, read it a few years ago.
raven
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: If you see the foxes don’t look at them.
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: The Indian myths are the exact opposite of this. One man, even an incarnation of Vishnu can’t do much against the forces of evil. Rama needs his rag tag band of bears and monkeys to defeat Ravana.
In Mahabharata, Krishna doesn’t lift a weapon, he is just an advisor to the Pandavas. Its the Kauravas that have the best and renowned fighters and yet they lose.
One person taking on everyone and winning is not a part of Indian mythology, AFAIK.
ETA: A famous outlaw story I can think of is the Buddhist story of Angulimala (Finger garland). He collects fingers from his victims, in the end he becomes a Buddhist and gives up violence.
Brachiator
The Lone Ranger never killed anyone, and unlike Trump, he often used his brains to outwit the bad guys. And more than simply saving the townspeople, he often was the factor that tipped the balance to the side of good, helping people see their own strength.
And while many of the 50s tv westerns were simplistic, a lot of them were tough minded and dealt realistically with American western history.
But westerns, like most other American pop culture, often simply erased non-whites and women, even though they were part of the history. And even 60s revisionist westerns perpetuated these lies. Neither version of True Grit, for example, even hints that some of the most successful US Marshalls in the Oklahoma territory were African American.
Fair Economist
@patrick II: I took the story of “Hero” as being pro-modern Chinese government propaganda. Basically the claim is that even evil on a epic unforgettable scale (and the First Emperor was one of the great monsters of history) is “OK” if it unifies China. The apologia for the current government seems pretty obvious to me.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Amir Khalid: My Lone Ranger comes from the pulp-era novels, where a good chunk of the first book is spent criticizing the usual way of breaking a horse.
@Adam L Silverman: Bass Reeves shows up in Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear. With a friend named Tomoatooah.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat:
1) I’m very familiar with On Angulimala from the Sutipitika. Angulimala isn’t the hero of that story. The historic Buddha is for using his Buddha powers to bring Angulimala to where he can realize the error of his ways and change his life.
2) Notice I didn’t include any mythical or fictionalized historic figures from the subcontinent in my list?
Another Scott
Synchronicity, maybe. I just heard Kenny Loggins sing This is it on the XM channel I’ve got on:
I’ve always like the song, but don’t recall carefully listening to the lyrics before. Yeah, it’s a love song, but one could take it as being more.
Cheers,
Scott.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Mary G:
…and have a gun (it’s right there in the name!)
SgrAstar
@Adam L Silverman: I went to college with a descendant of Chairman Oishi, the leader of the 47 ronin. The film about them, Chushingura, is pretty spectacular.
Bill Arnold
Great post, well-written.
patrick II
@Fair Economist:
I agree. But it was a huge hit in China because it has a resonance with their historical myths, in this case the story of an assasination attempt on the Empero of Qin in about 227. Similar to our Republican presidents playing off of the lone gunman/cowboy myth — Bush with his Texas ranch, and Trump in his only me against the world rebellious (but in a religious way ((See: The Faith of Donald J. Trump: a Spiritual Biography))) way.
Which goes to show the sophisticated and self-aware modern repackaging of myth to serve political purpose.
Mr Stagger Lee
@raven: Boudica, Queen of the Celtic Iieni vs, the Romans.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
I had always read that Kurosawa based his film on an old story he had found about a group of ronin who helped some farmers. But a connection to the tales of samurai avenging their master is very interesting.
Adam L Silverman
@SgrAstar: Cool.
raven
@Another Scott: “NBC used the song as theme music for its coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in 1980 and 1981”
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: I did notice, I was just offering a counterpoint to the lone heroic figure narrative.
ETA: Angulimala is heroic in my eyes for realizing the error of his ways. That might is not always right.
Ruckus
@Corner Stone:
drumpf can’t understand anything more complex that a burger order at McD.
Really this is the basis of everything he does. He has to put it in his terms because that’s all he understands. He has to keep it extremely simple because that’s all he understands. And he has to win because he is the Lone Ranger. I have no idea who Tonto is in his tiny little broken mind, possibly/probably he is so limited that he also thinks he doesn’t need Tonto.
Isn’t having a “rich” spoiled white moron, raised by a spoiled racist asshole as president of a country fun?
Adam L Silverman
@Mr Stagger Lee: Nakano Takeko.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: It is about as far from what is classically considered the Chusingura genre as one can get and still be part of it. I know people who are argue convincingly that it isn’t part of the genre and others who do.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: That was heroically lonely of you.
Sister Golden Bear
@Corner Stone: “Seven Samuri” was explicitly an homage to Hollywood Westerns by Kurosawa.
ETA: “Yojimbo” was an homage to Hammet’s “Continental Ops” series of short stories — also featuring a nameless protagonist.
JMG
We shouldn’t forget the private eye, the updated version of the Western lone hero but with a car instead of a horse and a fedora instead of a Stetson. If anything, private eye more isolated and alienated from society.
raven
@Adam L Silverman: Wow, a Jefferson Airplane reference!
raven
@JMG: And now Hall n Oates, we be rockin up in here!
patrick II
@Adam L Silverman:
I think that, as a result of their vengeance upon Kira Yoshinaka, the ronin committed suicide, because they in turn had violated the code of Bu.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
I think it’s more like what Brachiator noted at #66.
@Adam L Silverman:
Or maybe the Continental Op in Red Harvest.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
Sort of like people who consider Shitgibbon a successful businessman?
Heidi Mom
The most recent version of The Magnificent Seven (the Denzel version) didn’t fare too well with critics, but I enjoyed it, and the ending — i.e., who gets to ride off into the sunset — was very satisfying.
Adam L Silverman
@patrick II: Correct.
Ruckus
@raven:
Corriganville was going strong while I was a very small child and then Disneyland opened up and dad had a very long time friend who lived a few blocks from there and his oldest daughter got one of the early character jobs. We were Disneyland people.
Corriganville really wound down by the time I was five/six and my parents weren’t old west fans so we never went. We did used to go out once in a while to Calico, a deserted gold mining town east of Barstow that is now a San Bernardino county park. With water bags hanging from the hood ornament because car cooling systems were so good.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@SFAW: Por que no los dos?
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
@SFAW:
Also: that can be said about almost any uber-swordsman character, whether it’s Mifune playing him, or Wakayama, or Katsu, or Nakadai, or take-your-pick. It’s not unlike comparing any expert/champion who comes after the original-who-just-happens-to-still-be-considered-the-greatest-ever, similarities or not.
SFAW
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
For which?
patrick II
In America the Lone Gunman, the Protestant ethic, and Economic’s invisible hand (if we act in our own self interest it will work out to be for the common good) combine and reinforce each other to make it more difficult to work for the common good. When I talk to people about Healthcare to republicans they all resent paying subsidies to help pay healthcare costs. They should take care of it themselves (lone gunman), they aren’t deserving in the eyes of God since they aren’t financially successful (protestant ethic) and they haven’t contributed enough to the economy as individuals to have earned the right to see a doctor.
Those ideas are further reinforce by racist aspects of those myths — Cheryl’s observation that the lone gunman is white, southern fundamentalists view that non-white people came from different ancient tribes not blessed by god, and the white european origins of white capitalism reinforce the tribalism that lets others different from themselves suffer.
So, we are the only industrialized country without Universal Healthcare.
Doug R
The Lone Ranger is actually based on Bass Reeves, the first black marshal. He brought in over 3,000 fugitives and only had to kill 14 bad guys who usually shot first.
He used to go out with a handful of warrants and a posse with a wagon into Oklahoma territory on his light horse and hand out silver dollars for information. Not being white helped a lot with the locals trusting him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_Reeves
frosty
@raven: That’s it! I thought I recognized the name.
patrick II
@Doug R:
The NBC show “Timeless” got that right as the heroes traveled back in time and needed the help of the “real” lone ranger, portrayed by a black actor. Good for them.
Bex
@Another Scott: It started as a love song, but Loggins rewrote when his father was sick and in the hospital.
Doug R
@patrick II:
When is Denzel Washington going to star in a real movie about Bass Reeves?
smintheus
I like the ’50s alternate western, Suddenly, where it’s the arrival of the president that disrupts the town. The good men (plural) with the guns are incapable of dealing with the killers precisely because they have guns. It takes a normal guy with a TV to save the day.
Ruckus
@patrick II:
The only part of your comment that I’d take some exception to is the southern fundamentalist part. It wasn’t just the south that had the fundamentalist view points, that may have been stronger there but it was and is everywhere in this country. And it wasn’t just what we might term the fundamentalist viewpoint, the puritans didn’t come here because of persecution, they came here to practice it. The English joke is that they sent all the criminals to Australia and all the religious nuts to America.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@SFAW: Musashi + Red Harvest = the Yojimbo, with a hefty dollop of American Western Film thrown in for flavor is how I’ve always seen that movie.
When I’m not trying to not laugh at an Eastwood fan seeing it for the first time, that is.
MattF
@Fair Economist: Y’know, it never occurred to me that there’s something… peculiar… about the Lone Ranger wearing a mask. Who, exactly, is going to recognize him? And suppose someone does, what happens then?
justawriter
My favorite John Wayne movie is The Cowboys. Lone Gunman Wayne is slaughtered halfway through by rustlers and a bunch of kids led by the Black Cook {played by the wonderful Roscoe Lee Browne} get the cattle back and rout the bad guys. My favorite line actually came from the Mad Magazine parody.
Browne: You can’t fight like kids. I will teach you to fight like men.
Kids: Hows that?
Browne: Dirty!
MattF
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Well, I think Red Harvest is in a class by itself.
SFAW
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Perhaps. But if one starts from the idea that the story is patterned after Red Harvest, then the choice (for Kurosawa) of leading character is probably limited to gunman or swordsman. Kurosawa did plenty of non-samurai flicks set in the current time, but I imagine he thought it would work better with a ronin. And once you make that choice, having a mediocre swordsman won’t cut it. [No, that wasn’t intended to be wordplay.] And once you decide to make him a champ swordsman, he’ll be compared to Musashi, in much the same way that Maradona was compared to Pele’, whether or not they’re similar.
ETA: I am not 100 percent certain that Kurosawa decided to make a samurai Red Harvest, but I think it’s probably pretty likely.
rikyrah
@Mary G:
Yes, kids.,tell it
rikyrah
@CarolDuhart2:
I will continue to say that they- both the GOP and the MSM are upset that we haven’t relented and continue to protest Dolt45
Roger Moore
@patrick II:
As I understand the story, it’s a bit more complex. The 47 Ronin presented the Shogun with a difficult problem. On the one hand, they had broken the law by carrying out an unofficial feud. On the other hand, they showed proper devotion to their dead master by avenging him, and at a time when the Shogun was worried about declining standards among the samurai class. He solved the problem by allowing them to commit honorable suicide rather than having them dishonorably executed.
oldgold
Was Andy of Mayberry, in some respects, a spoof of this lone gunman theme that was so prevalent at the time?
Andy, conspicuously without a gun, encouraged his fellow citizens to act better and in concert to solve problems. Meanwhile, the lone gunman, Barney, was portrayed as a buffoon.
And, yes, I am aware the show on matters of race was very deficient.
patrick II
Now that the thread is winding down a bit from american myth analysis, I will tell my related but slightly OT story of Clayton Moore — the man who played the Lone Ranger. I had a friend in the 70’s who owned a car dealership. By then “The Lone Ranger” had been off of TV for awhile, but was still well known. Clayton Moore was making appearances as the Lone Ranger to make a living after the end of the show. My friend John had hired him to make an appearance at his car dealership. John picked him up at a local motel and drove him to the dealership and then back to motel afterward. John said that from the time he got into his Lone Ranger outfit at the hotel until he returned he was the lone Ranger. No cussing, no drinking and speaking in the rather mannered structure of the Lone Ranger. John found amazing how much he stayed in character.
David Letterman had on Jay Thomas on every year to tell one of Letterman’s favorite stories — that of Jay Thomas driving with the “Lone Ranger” after one his appearances which has now been saved to Youtube. Jay Thomas The Lone Ranger Story.
tomtofa
@Adam L Silverman: The interesting thing to me about the source ‘hero’ stories is that the hero fails.
Gilgamesh gets his best friend/lover killed, and loses the herb of rejuvenation to a snake (who sheds his old skin as he slithers away). Returns home alone and empty handed.
Perceval fails to ask the crucial question of the Fisher King, and doesn’t get the Grail. And so on.
The lesson of these stories is not the current one about the lone hero; just the opposite. The Japanese hero tales are drawn from modern Western sources (Yojimbo is a retelling of Hammett’s ‘Glass Key’, for instance).
SFAW
@tomtofa:
Or Red Harvest.
Zinsky
Cheryl – the metaphor of the noble cowboy, riding the range and sleeping in his clothes under the stars while gunning down the evildoers with a steely eye, is a favorite myth of the American right. Ronald Reagan used it to great acclaim – George W. Bush too, even though he reputedly was afraid of horses! Fatass Rush Limbaugh loves the expression “rugged individualism” although the most “rugged” he has seen in his pathetic, worthless life is when his maid was late in bringing him some illicit OxyContin. These types are always wimps at heart. As my father, who was the epitome of a masculine figure used to say, “real men don’t have to always remind people that they really are”.
oldgold
@patrick II:
That was a great story. Thank you for sharing it.
Aleta
@Adam L Silverman: Kurosawa was open about sometimes emulating Western writers and filmmakers he admired. Yojimbo is based on a story from Western culture (just as Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Ran , etc. were).
There’s an assumption in the West that period films from Japan that use J- type arts and sword practice necessarily represent thought in traditional older Japanese culture. For his scenes, Kurosawa used some of the best (incredible) practitioner- teachers available (and historians for his battles), but in certain movies he purposely merged that with ideas and plots taken from the West. He enjoyed doing that I believe.
Though the script for Sanjuro was at first based on a Japanese story, Kurosawa was asked to change it to resemble Yojimbo, because that theme/character, being comprehensible to Western audiences, was helping J cinema become popular in other parts of the world. (And in turn brought the influence of Kurosawa’s beautiful filmmaking to directors in Russia, Germany, India, the US, Britain…)
The distinction about culture matters for a couple of reasons.
JimV
Re: the Lone Gunman mythos.
Siegfried, Beowulf, Horatio at the Bridge, Achilles, …
Cheryl Rofer
@Zinsky:
That has been driving me nuts at least since the 1990s. In foreign policy, it extrapolates to “A truly powerful nation doesn’t have to keep reminding others it has nukes.” Which says something interesting about Vladimir Putin’s great need to remind us of his nukes, as well as Donny’s.
raven
@Ruckus: We moved to LA (Whittier) in 57 just as Disney opened!
Aleta
@Adam L Silverman:
Could you explain your thinking on that, or give links? My understanding of the historical story and its offshoots is quite different.
SFAW
@Aleta:
Thanks! Great comment.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@SFAW: Kurosawa said it was based on The Glass Key. A lot of people, including Kurosawa scholars, think Red Harvest is a closer fit. I think he borrowed some details from Musashi to ground the whole thing in something that would resonate with his audience.
oatler.
Did anyone EVER read “Don Quixote”?
yeah, me neither
Villago Delenda Est
@Emma: When will these peasants learn their place? When?
Wild Cat
@oldgold:
I always felt that bizarre good-rural period on mid-60s TV (Andy Griffith; Gomer Pyle; Green Acres; Petticoat Junction; Hee-Haw) was to placate and normalize certain regions that weren’t overly kind to the Civil Rights movements. And for nostalgic revisionism, this old classic:
https://spookycomics.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/drew-and-griffith.jpg
tomtofa
@SFAW: I know there are different views on it. I read that Kurosawa said the inspiration was the film version of Glass Key; others see more of Red Harvest in it.
Totally OT, but Miller’s Crossing is another film that people say was influenced by both Hammett works.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
Of course, the historical Musashi was interested in perfecting his skills, not serving as a blade for hire.
I loved the 1950s three part Musashi Miyamoto saga directed by Hiroshi Ignagaki. I’ve read that an earlier version of a film he directed about Musashi was confiscated by the postwar US authorities because they wanted to suppress native Japanese films that were too militaristic.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@StringOnAStick:
She was just the saloon owner I thought
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@schrodingers_cat:
Not quite, as others have already noted. My nym is named after a fictional character that, throughout much of his franchise, is the lone hero who saves everyone and fights the bad guys. It’s from Japan.
Corner Stone
@tomtofa:
Miller’s Crossing is one of my all time favorites. I watch it every couple of years just to see how it plays. And I’ve gotta tell you, I am getting pretty tired of being given the High Hat.
SFAW
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Cite? Because I heard Red Harvest more than 30, maybe even 40 years ago, i.e., before “all possibilities that ever existed at any time about anything” became findable on the Intertubez. And, from what little I know of The Glass Key, it’s not a great fit re: story line.
OK, so I took a few minutes to take a look. It appears there are two schools of thought. Be that as it may, the plot lines up much more with Red Harvest than with Glass Key. There’s some old line about a duck …
tomtofa
@Corner Stone: Youse fancy pants.
Imdb has a page of great quotes from movies. There are a ton in Miller’s Crossing:
Aleta
@SFAW: Why a duck?
Chris T.
The W in Rex W Tillerson stands for Wayne?! http://swordandscale.com/the-wayne-theory/
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Amir Khalid: wins the thread
Ruckus
@raven:
Disneyland opened in 1955. We went not long after my birthday and very shortly after it opened. It’s just a bit different today than I remember it 63 yrs ago.
Aleta
@Aleta: It’s deep water that’s why a duck, you turkey.
SFAW
@Aleta:
I don’t know. I know why a chicken and why a horse, but not why a duck.
Unless I’m driving a Ford.
mattH
@geg6:
That scene at the end of Blazing Saddles when everyone in town and on the railroad crew have to work together to defeat the corporate and corrupt government forces is the best part. Both hopeful and proscriptive.
I’ve got young coworkers and every time Spaceballs is played in the break room, someone asks what my favorite satire is, or what my favorite Mel Brooks film is, or some similar subject, and every time I mention how good Blazing Saddles is as both a satire and social commentary, and even how well it plays today, but most of them find it boring, or crude (and probably vulgar ) and I tell them every time I try to explain that we aren’t past those things and it’s a reasonably safe way to view some of the things it addresses. The social commentary aspect of it elevates it above Young Frankenstein for me.
JR
I hope the families of the Waffle House victims get every last penny of Reinking’s father’s assets.
Aleta
@SFAW: Why would you want a Ford if you got a horse?
Tokyokie
@geg6: The main people behind Blazing Saddles were either Jewish (Mel Brooks, Andrew Bergman, Gene Wilder) or black (Richard Pryor, Cleavon Little), either nonwhites or white, but not really white enough. They not only merrily destroy the lone gunman hero myth, they invariably portray its proponents as racist morons, as though one has to be both a racist and a moron to subscribe to it.
Spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and early 1970s are interesting for their invariably caustic take on the same theme. In Sergio Leone’s Per un pugno di dollari, the lone gunman rides into town and, like the U.S. military in Vietnam, destroys the town in order to save it. In his C’era una volta il West, the malignant force is capitalism itself, as personified by the obsessive and crippled rail baron; the lone gunman cares only about revenge (against the rail baron’s gun thug), and the town is no concern of his whatsoever.
Other spaghetti western directors were even more explicit in their criticism of the American mythos. The lone gunman may save the town in Sergio Corbucci’s Django, but the town is run by a thinly disguised version of the Ku Klux Klan, and in his best film, Il grande silenzio, the lone gunman (whose lover is black) fails to save the town at all. In Sergio Corbucci’s La resa dei conti, the lone white gunman is hired to by a corrupt landowner and political kingmaker to track down the poor Mexican peasant unjustly accused of a crime, though at the end, the white loner switches sides and guns down the true evildoers. And in my personal favorite, Damiano Damiani’s Quié sabe?, the lone white gunman’s explicit purpose is to cripple a leftist revolution in Mexico; in the end, he’s shot dead as he boards a train bound for the United States, his corpse and the rot it represents returning to the place that produced it.
Thoughtful American directors like John Ford had difficulty in rejecting the lone white gunman myth. In The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that gunman, as personified by John Wayne, plays a necessary role in establishing white civilization on the frontier even though that civilization has no place for its champion. However, Italian directors, all of them left-leaning, were not enculturated with that myth and have little difficulty in rejecting and criticizing it. And they have a lot of fun doing just that.
PIGL
@Skepticat: It wasn’t until the 3rd time watching The Outlaw Josie Wales that I realized that the gunmen, lone or otherwise, were usually outlaw rebel confederates. The link between slavery, the myth of the Old West, the remanufactured mythos of the NRA heroes, it’s direct and total.
Tokyokie
Bah. I meant Sergio Sollima, not Sergio Corbucci, as the director of La resa dei conti. Too damn many Sergios.
John Thomson
@NotMax: “his faithful Indian companion, Tonto,” Jay Silverheels,
Bonnie
@oatler.: I read Don Quixote in a literature class at the University of Washington. The teacher who taught the class insisted that we had to use the American pronunciation of Don Quixote not the French. I still it Don Quicksit. And, I hated the book all 500+ pages of it. The lead character is actually quite sad.
SFAW
@Aleta:
More horses in a Mustang? Dunno.
SFAW
@John Thomson:
From Toronto?
Groucho48
Remember the old TV series Nichols? James Garner played a sheriff who went around unarmed and solved crimes using his wits. A pretty amusing show. But, got low ratings. So, the network had the unarmed Nichols killed by a gunman and, on the next train, in came his twin brother, who took over as sheriff and who was perfectly happy to shoot bad guys. I kid you not.
Jim Parish
@SFAW: No, to Toronto. For Esperanto. And pronto!
Chris
The best Westerns subvert this. One of my favorites is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, precisely because the whole story is about the transformation of the setting into the kind of “civilized,” “tame” place where gunfighters like John Wayne’s character have no place… and while that’s presented as sad for John Wayne, it’s also made pretty clear that it’s a good thing for ordinary people.
Wish I could imagine that movie getting made today. For that matter even The Magnificent Seven has its moments. One of the better moments in that movie is where one of the village children repeats that whole “our fathers are cowards not real men like you gunfighters” thing, and the gunfighter responds by blistering their ears about how much courage it takes to be a farmer and raise a family. I don’t imagine that part making it into most modern action movies, either.
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
Or just an attempt to clone Eric Cartman.
Chris
@CarolDuhart2:
I have a private theory that the Iraqi public’s refusal to play their assigned role as the happy flag-waving flower-throwing background extras in the campaign commercial the Bush administration was trying to film… did more to fuel Islamophobia in the U.S. than 9/11 did. Getting attacked is one thing, but getting rejected and made a fool of? That’s unforgivable.
catatonia
@tomtofa:
There are so many, even that comprehensive list misses some —
Leo: Tom, you know O’Doul and the Mayor
Tom: I ought to, I voted for him six times in the last election.
Mayor: And that ain’t the record, either.
patrick II
@PIGL:
Those hero ex-confederate soldiers were tiresome — it’s why I like “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer” so much. It showed the confederates for what they were — slowly sucking the blood out of our country.
patrick II
Cheryl Rofer:
That may be true for some shows, but not for the Lone Ranger. The show was conscious of and very careful to make other white guys the bad guys.
patrick II
@Groucho48:
I liked Nichols. It is set at a time when the change from horse and buggy to machines was happening. Nichols rode a motorcycle. I think it was supposed to be like Bret Maverick but fifteen years later.
moonbat
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Jeez, while Kurosawa makes no bones about being inspired by Shakespeare and other western sources for movies like Ran and Throne of Blood, The Seven Samurai is NOT a western story. It is a story about the Japanese value of cooperative action over the rugged individualism that Americans favor. The point is made time and again in the film when people choose to go it alone they are defeated. The villagers and the samurai are successful only when they work together. It was stolen from for The Magnificent Seven which put its Lone Gunman spin on things because ‘that’s how Americans like it.’ The Seven Samurai is in no way shape or form based on the 47 Ronin legend which is all about samurai regaining honor in the face of a humiliating defeat — the death and dishonor of their lord.
Other cultures do actually have legends and memes and stories of their own that they feel are worth telling and retelling. Not everything is a reflection of us.
Chris
@patrick II:
Wild Wild West is one of my guilty pleasures for much the same reason, substituting “steampunk Bond villains” for “vampires.”
(The movie, not the TV show. The TV show doesn’t acquit itself nearly as honorably on that front).
moonbat
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: And in his wildest dreams Ford wishes he could direct a movie as powerful as The Seven Samurai.
bjacques
Steve Bannon, whose trusty steed is ideology;
Ben Carson, a famous doctor who rides into town to make people’s lives better;
Scott Pruitt, whose extreme effectiveness makes him a target of bad guys everywhere.
James Comey, too, sees himself as the lawman armed with integrity and righteousness and destined to save this town.
Gamergate, Malpractice, Rooster Cogburn and Misplaced Sense Of Duty = low-rent Four Horsemen cosplay. Terry Pratchett’s and Neil Gaiman’s take on the concept was much better.