Nekkid Hero

Not long ago, I watched a live-action Japanese shot-on-video film, based on a manga (Japanese comic book), about Kekko Kamen, a superheroine who wears a mask, gloves, boots — and nothing else. It was one of the most ridiculous films I have ever seen. A laughable plot, contrived conflicts, unrealistic characters — all of these showed me the absurd lengths to which some filmmakers (if that’s not too generous a word for the creators of Kekko Kamen) will go to put some female skin on the screen. 

In addition to being a manga and live-action video series, Kekko Kamen also exists as an anime series.  The basic plots of all the episodes — manga, anime, and live-action video — are the same: a young, innocent schoolgirl at a sadistic boarding school run by a sinister and thuggish faculty is tormented by her teachers, often in a lewd and extravagant manner, only to be rescued in the nick of time by the almost-unclad Kekko Kamen, who uses her nude torso to distract the villains while her face-covering mask conceals her identity.  Her alter ego is never revealed to us.  Each episode begins and ends the same way, leading the serious-minded viewer to ask, “Why don’t the girls just leave the school?”  Obviously, Kekko Kamen takes place on an exaggerated alternate Earth where such a question would never be asked and such a peculiarly costumed superhero wouldn’t be arrested for indecent exposure.  


The reason why I mention this absurd exploitation movie is because Kekko Kamen makes farcical use of something that I think is a potentially serious concept: the nude hero. Today, when a nude body appears in story-telling media, that body will usually belong to a female, and her state of undress will signal her defenselessness in the face of the story’s malignant forces (think of the average slasher movie).  This is understandable: conflict in stories (the engine of the narratives) is often expressed by violence, and the undressed body — to state the obvious — is not an optimum defense against brute force.  So, the narrative idea of nudity as weakness is culturally overdetermined.  And the naked human body — an organic locus of being which we all possess and which needs demystification — in a story will signal a potential victim or a work of eroticism, which is a rather limited way to perceive such an essential entity.

But this wasn’t always the case in representational media.  Centuries ago, Greek, Renaissance, and Classical artworks expressed nakedness as power in statues and paintings of bare-bottomed Herculeses and Aphrodites seeming to draw strength and vigor from their absence of clothing. Granted, this is only a superficial view: volumes have been written about the nuances of nudity in works of art, how vintage depictions of the underdressed ancient gods were, for example, often a veiled form of eroticism.  Still, this tradition in art marked one serious context that depicted nudity as something other than vulnerability and victimization.  Could this tradition of nakedness as power be continued in non-erotic audio-visual media for mature audiences? 


But depicting nude women also brings up another issue: the naked female as disempowered sexual object.  While this approach is one very legitimate way of addressing this topic, it isn’t the only way.  Much scholarship has been written about patriarchal artists and filmmakers using the image of the female nude to “control” feminine representation — and by extension, feminine behavior — in society.  But even this academic view is premised on the idea that there is something worth controlling, that women are by their very nature something more than passive objects.  Of course, one element that patriarchy usually seeks to control is women’s sexual attractiveness.  And such patriarchal means of control can express itself in everything from the burka (keeping attractive women hidden) to the “girlie” magazine (channeling female attractiveness into a benign outlet so that it won’t channel itself into a more subversive one).  Such efforts to “control” indicate that female attractiveness — including female nudity — carries its own disruptive power.  True, this is a power that can easily be appropriated by patriarchy, but it is a power nevertheless.  So, for all the talk of female nudity as disempowering “objectification,” a woman can still utilize her own nakedness as a source of strength — sexual, self-confident, and so on.

However, because nudity as a significant narrative element has been neglected by the more prestigious story-telling media (mainly out of a desire to reach their largest possible audiences, understandably), narrative emphasis on the bare human body has usually been relegated to eroticism or exploitation — hence, a cheaply made and silly toss-off like Kekko Kamen.  But if a story were to use a knowingly naked hero or heroine in a serious and/or realsitic situation, what would such a use of nudity look like?  For an idea, I would point to media that is, for the most part, disdained, disregarded, or little-seen.

A naked hero in a more solemn vein is Richard Corben’s science-fiction comic Den (also brought to the screen as a segment in the 1981 animated feature Heavy Metal). Den’s story takes place in an alternate, primitive world where fighting the bad guys and monsters sans apparel — as its muscle-bound eponymous hero does — is no big deal. Often grim and bloody but also whimsical, Corben’s comic serves as a serious rejoinder to Kekko Kamen’s laughably ludicrous stories.  Still, like the Japanese manga (and the mythology-based paintings before it), Den signals to its readers that nakedness and heroism can only co-exist in a surrogate universe.  

‘Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ (1977)

A depiction of heroic nudity on this planet — albeit in one of its remote corners — can be found in the otherwise schlocky and cheesy Italian exploitation movie Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali, 1977), an entry in the so-called “Black Emanuelle” series of soft-core sex films, starring Laura Gemser, a Dutch model of Indonesian descent.  In this movie, a civilian expedition of the Amazon — which includes the female photojournalist of the title (Gemser) — crosses into one of the region’s unexplored territories, an area inhabited by brutal and bloodthirsty cannibals.  In the film’s climax, when the youngest member of the expedition is captured by the flesh-eaters, Emanuelle strips out of her clothes and walks into the cannibals’ encampment.  Pretending to be their fertility goddess, Emanuelle is able to spirit away the equally naked abductee.  Only later do the cannibals realize Emanuelle’s ruse and chase after her.  

What I like about the scene (when I can ignore the condescending portrayal of the “cannibals”) is that Emanuelle’s nudity becomes an agent of her personal power.  The cannibals are so in awe of her naked body, and the confidence with which she wields it, that they surrender their prisoner to her. For all its obvious emphasis on the erotic, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals is notable for its depiction of a woman who doffs her clothes and knowingly walks into a dangerous situation, and who escapes that situation precisely because she is naked to begin with.  In one of those rare moments in the movies, a woman’s nudity is not a mark of vulnerability or victimization — but of strength.  It’s difficult to think of a similar scene in all the rest of cinema.  

However, a maker of more prestigious movies, Hungarian art-film director Miklós Jancsó, also uses nudity in an unconventional way.  While in some of his films, Jancsó depicts the naked body as a sign of his characters’ humiliation and victimization by the antagonists, he depicts it in another way in many of his other movies.  While Jancsó’s earlier films took place in naturalistic settings with traditional, story-driven narratives, his later ones became more allegorical, with characters representing larger themes rather than individuals with believable motives and behaviors.  In these films, Jancsó utilizes nudity more for its symbolic value than as an indication of a character’s psychology.  

One such film is Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1972).  Notionally based on a failed Hungarian peasant uprising in the late 19th century, Jancsó’s “story” is more of a meditation on the issues surrounding how a proposed workers’ state would be philosophically different from the hierarchical capitalistic order with which it would have to struggle to come into being.  The film is set entirely on an open field, but the place is more of a conceptual site for the conflicting agencies of Hungarian history to interact than it is an actual physical space.  Consequently, Red Psalm doesn’t focus on any of the peasants or members of the ruling order individually; the people only represent the classes they belong to, with only a few of the characters differentiated from their groups.  Made at a time when Hungary was a communist regime, this proselytizing film unambiguously takes the side of the proto-communist peasants, painting the ruling class and the army that supports it as less than fully human.  In this context, Jancsó’s employment of nakedness serves to emphasize the peasants’ humanity, in contrast to the inhumanity of their uniformed and well-dressed opponents.  

Miklós Jancsó’s ‘Red Psalm’ (1972)

In one scene, when the army threatens the rebellious peasants’ village, three women workers bare their breasts to ward away the soldiers.  Then the three walk off into the distance, removing all their clothing.  The soldiers charge towards the women, apparently to attack them, but ultimately run or ride past them.  The other peasants surround the nude women protectively as the soldiers rush away from them.  In this scene, the naked body proclaims a state of defiance.  It serves as an organic instrument with the innate power to keep its opponents at a distance, at least temporarily.  The three peasant women reappear throughout Red Psalm in various states of undress, personifying the fecundity of the land and the workers closeness to it.  This scene is another depiction of nakedness more as strength than as weakness.  

However, precisely because the film is allegorical, the scene’s portrayal of powerful naked women walking undaunted into danger is just as fanciful and unbelievable as anything in Kekko Kamen (in a more naturalistic setting, the soldiers would likely attack the women).  Red Psalm may be more serious and thoughtful than anything to do with the Japanese manga character, but the Hungarian film is no closer to portraying a practical and true-to-life imagining of naked heroism.

The physical body is a vital part of who we are as human beings, and its unclad state is a reminder of how we came into the world, as well as our being a part of it.  For this reason, it seems limiting to relegate depictions of the naked body in our story-telling media primarily to erotic and exploitative cinema.  The world of Classical art, for all its limitations, provided images of human nudity (even if primarily in the form of anthropomorphic deities) not solely in the realm of eroticism — and perhaps beyond it.  I would like to see films, videos, and other contemporary story-telling media find a similar non-erotic (or not exclusively erotic) way of portraying the naked human body in a serious, verisimilitudinous context.  One portrayal could be human nakedness as a sign of strength and power, rather than as a sign of titillation or vulnerability.  And works like Kekko Kamen, Den, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, and Red Psalm indicate just how far off such an earnest and naturalistic depiction of naked heroism is.  

Perhaps American society will first need to reverse the unclad human body’s social stigmatization.  Perhaps its ghettoization into eroticism and exploitation is a reflection of society’s unacceptance of nudity outside very restricted contexts.  But if we could get beyond this, we would still need to imagine what a more liberated use of the naked human body in film would look like.  And how might it change cinema?

Poster for the 2012 sequel ‘Kekko Kamen: Reborn’

Film Noir, Part Three

Here is a post that I originally wrote on the Internet Movie Database:

Still from the trailer for ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

Stylistically speaking, The Big Sleep (1946) is not the most exemplary film noir. The best noir films seethe with hard, stark shadows and heroes (or anti-heroes) feverishly unraveling under ominous circumstances. And The Big Sleep is missing this kind of visual and narrative delirium. The cinematography, compared to other film noirs, is relatively even-toned, and the lead character is too self-assured, and too reassuring to the viewer, to allow the story to spiral into uncertainty.  In fact, Foster Hirsch, author of the book Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, considers The Big Sleep to be the most overrated film noir.

However, The Big Sleep boasts something that no other film noir can: the ultimate film-noir actor — Humphrey Bogart — playing the ultimate film-noir character — quintessential hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe. And this distinction more than makes up for any stylistic shortcomings. 

I wish that Bogart had done more films as Raymond Chandler’s creation. Wouldn’t it have been terrific if Warner Brothers had shortly afterwards adapted Chandler’s The High Window (a.k.a. The Brasher Doubloon) and The Lady in the Lake with Bogart playing Marlowe, instead of the adaptations that were ultimately made with other actors by other studios? In such a case, maybe Robert Montgomery’s noble experiment of a Hollywood movie seen almost entirely from a subjective camera — which his Lady in the Lake (1947) was — could have been based on a less canonical hard-boiled book. (But Dick Powell’s turn as Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet [1944] is so good that I wouldn’t want to erase it from the history books.) 

Some might say that Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, also played by Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), was the more definitive film-noir private eye and wish that Bogart had done more movies as that character instead. But Spade only appeared in that one novel and a few short stories, while Marlowe appeared in a series of novels by Chandler. 

Since the actor’s death in 1957, Humphrey Bogart has become an icon, a true star of the cinema whose image and mannerisms are indelibly ingrained in our popular consciousness — so much so that the American Film Institute named him the greatest male screen legend of all time.  Bogart has come to define the postwar Hollywood hard-boiled hero as much as John Wayne has come to define the western-movie hero.  Even now, when a mystery movie depicts a streetwise sleuth, that character — however tangentially, however unconsciously, and often deliberately — evokes Bogart.  And yet, he played fewer investigators in his varied career than his popular image would suggest.  


I can’t help wondering what it would have been like if Bogart’s filmography did more to live up to that image of the definitive hard-boiled private eye.  And I think that our popular conception of this kind of fictional figure owes more to the character of Philip Marlowe than it does to Sam Spade, whose name is usually invoked in summoning up this kind of detective.  For these reasons, I think that a handful of big-budget films with this archetypal actor as this archetypal character would do better justice to the standings of both Bogart and Marlowe in our popular culture and our collective unconscious.  



The trailer for ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

I’m a ‘Movie Fan Fare’ Guest Blogger

The website Movie Fan Fare has posted a review of mine, a condensed version of my blog post about Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure.  They posted it Monday, and it’s received 39 comments so far.  Not too shabby.

My 10 Favorite Action Films

I became a movie buff by watching the great art films, character dramas, and romantic comedies of decades past. Those are the kinds of movies that I truly love. When I was becoming aware of the cinema, “action movies” meant Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson or some other monosyllabic marksman blowing away or beating up some two-dimensional bad guy in stories with no emotional depth or narrative complexity. Only the balletic martial-arts moves of Bruce Lee and the other emerging kung-fu stars of Hong Kong provided an alternative, where action did not mean cruelty, and strength did not mean sheer brute force. But as much as I relished their artful acrobatics, the Hong Kong films themselves seemed crudely made and thematically underdeveloped.

Only more recently, in my view, have filmmakers coupled clever and intelligent story lines with action scenes whose cinematic engagement packs the same visceral punch as the physical conflicts they depict. So, I have become an aficionado of action movies fairly late in the game. And by “action movie,” I mean those stories of derring-do, those somewhat pulpy parables where men and women of great physical skill draw upon their best resources to defeat an impending evil. I do not pretend to be a connoisseur — after all, I'm sure that I have seen relatively few Asian or occidental action movies compared to those who seek them out and live on a steady diet of rifles and roundhouse kicks. But of those that I have seen, these are my favorites...

1. SEVEN SAMURAI

Directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1954)

Really more than a mere “action movie,” this tale of seven masterless rônin — who defy the class distinctions of feudal Japan to rescue a peasant village — brims over with keen human insight. The story sensitively explores how the adventure disrupts the lives of both the warriors and the villagers, all of whom are drawn as fully dimensional characters. But the film’s fervid action scenes hold the sprawling story together. Epic in the best sense of the word.

2. YOJIMBO (a.k.a. The Bodyguard)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1961)

Another major work by that Shakespeare of the chambara (and of virtually every other kind of film he directed), Akira Kurosawa. A wandering rônin comes to a small town ruled by two feuding crime families, and he sets them against each other. The story is cunningly clever and complex, matched by the swift precision of the swordfight scenes. As the “bodyguard” of the title, Toshirô Mifune has never been more charismatic. Later remade as the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and the gangster picture Last Man Standing (1996).

3. MAD MAX 2 (a.k.a. The Road Warrior)

Directed by George Miller (Australia/USA, 1981)

Running at a lean 91 minutes, this parable of post-apocalyptic road rage is a no-nonsense story of easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. In a world after nuclear holocaust, an outsider tries to save a village preyed on by marauders. The plot isn’t especially complex, and the characters are little more than action-movie archetypes. But the tautness of the story and the adrenaline-pumping impact of the car-chase scenes thrive on their own. The movie that made an international star of Mel Gibson.

4. PEKING OPERA BLUES

Directed by Tsui Hark (Hong Kong, 1986)

I may be a little prejudiced because this was the first of the “New Wave” Hong Kong action films that I saw, but I still think it’s the best of the bunch. The story is a bit comic-bookish — a ragtag team of republican revolutionaries in post-imperial China struggles against corrupt warlords and an evil gang boss — but it also touches on some surprisingly complex subjects: political commitment, family loyalty, female empowerment, and even transvestism. Director Tsui skillfully balances electrifying action with genuinely hilarious humor, all of which leads to a rousing climax. Pulpy, playful, and unpretentiously profound all at the same time.

5. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

Directed by Ang Lee (Taiwan/ China/USA, 2000)

Okay, so everybody already knows about this critically lauded and surprisingly popular “martial-arthouse” movie. But it has also garnered more than its fair share of hostile comments. Many have argued that it’s not particularly original and that its action scenes pale in comparison to the Hong Kong wuxia movies of the 1960s and ’70s. But Crouching Tiger can boast much better developed characters, a carefully cultivated story, and effective performances by the cast. In addition to having visceral, vibrantly staged fight scenes, this film has soul.

6. ROBOCOP

Directed by Paul Verhoeven (USA, 1987)

The notorious Dutch director’s Hollywood debut not only possesses some gut-wrenching action, a strong story line, and weighty themes of identity and individuality, but the movie is also a very witty political satire. A policeman is brutally killed in the line of duty but resurrected as a crime-fighting android.  The man-machine is supposed to have no personality, but the policeman’s memory comes back and discovers high crimes committed by the company that revived him.  In addition to its heart-pounding shoot-’em-up scenes, the movie is an incisive meditation on the loss of humanity in a corporate culture.  To quote one of the film's bad guys after he has just demolished a building with a munitions-grade firearm, “I like it!”

7. THE TERRA-COTTA WARRIOR

Directed by Ching Siu-Tung (Hong Kong, 1989)

An underappreciated gem from Hong Kong, this swordplay adventure tells a genuinely touching story of a guardsman to China's first emperor who awakens in the 20th century and believes that he’s found his lost love. The mythic narrative and Ching’s deft handling of the martial mayhem would automatically make this movie worth watching, but the film’s real standout is its off-kilter casting. Not only is the dual-role female lead played by dramatic diva Gong Li, but the action hero is played by her then-significant other and art-film director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, House of Flying Daggers). Just imagine Ingmar Bergman playing John Wayne, and you’ll get an idea of how bizarre the casting is. Still, Zhang makes an effective leading man, and the stars’ off-screen auras never interfere with the gripping story.

8. PROJECT S (a.k.a. Once a Cop; Supercop 2)

Directed by Stanley Tong (Hong Kong, 1993)

Crouching Tiger’s Michelle Yeoh reprises her comeback role as Inspector Yang, the by-the-book Chinese policewoman she created in Tong’s Police Story III: Supercop, opposite Jackie Chan. In this superb spin-off, Inspector Yang is summoned to Hong Kong to catch a gang of master thieves, only to learn that the gang is headed by her fiancé (Iron Monkey’s Yu Rong-Guang). Yang’s struggle between her feelings and her duties gives the air-tight story a surprising and effective emotional depth. And the action scenes pack an equally powerful punch. The dubbed and edited version available on video in the U.S. under the title Supercop 2 does no great damage to the original and actually better helps to convey the characters’ emotions to an English-speaking audience.

9. ROMEO MUST DIE

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak (USA, 2000)

Wherefore art thou Romeo? Valid complaints that Jet Li’s “Romeo” ends the movie as more of a platonic pal to his Juliet — and the dehumanizing stereotype of an Asian parent having his own child murdered — have unfortunately overshadowed this film’s strengths. The plot is plausible, intriguing, and easy to follow. The action scenes wallop the eye. And the characters display more emotional depth than the typical pulp-action archetypes. Jet Li’s first Hollywood starring vehicle remains a hard act to follow. 

10. THE EAST IS RED (a.k.a. Swordsman III)

Directed by Ching Siu-Tung and Raymond Lee (Hong Kong, 1993)

No movie list is complete without something from the category of weird and whacked out. In this spin-off to 1992’s supernatural swashbuckler Swordsman II, the very feminine Brigitte Lin of Peking Opera Blues goes tranny again by reprising her role as Asia the Invincible, a man who gained magical powers by having himself castrated. Gender is bent past the breaking point as Lin’s ruthless and destructive sorcerer moves easily between male and female identities. The uncertainty of Asia’s sexual identity suggests a similar uncertainty of Hong Kong’s national identity on the eve of its hand-over to China. And this gives the explosive mayhem at the movie’s end an insurgent edge: the cataclysmic climax implies both national anxiety in the face of totalitarian takeover and a fiery display of defiance. Deliciously delirious — and a bit ludicrous in places — but with an urgent undertone of political rebellion.

Recent Discovery: LEGEND OF THE BLACK SCORPION (a.k.a. The Banquet)


Directed by Feng Xiaogang (China/Hong Kong, 2006)

A retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet transposed to tenth-century China, but with a twist — the usurping emperor’s queen (Crouching Tiger’s Zhang Ziyi) is also the prince’s beloved.  In other words, imagine Hamlet if Claudius took over the Danish throne and married Ophelia instead of Gertrude.  The complexity of the plot and characters matches the sumptuousness of the art direction.  The fictional figures of the story are as intricate as those in any drama (which the film aspires to be, hence its less action-oriented alternate title), but the heightened conventions of the kung-fu film — gravity-defying combatants, superhuman swordplay — suffuse the narrative as well.  A resplendent combination of high drama and populist entertainment uncommon in occidental cinema.

Another Take on Faith in Politics

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Another Side of Bob Dylan’s Voice

Do you want to know how much angry feedback I got over my blog post about my not liking Bob Dylan’s singing voice?  Well ... none actually.  In fact, the only feedback I got to it was regarding the post’s illustrative photo.  But I can imagine a lot of angry music fans who like Bob Dylan’s voice taking me to task for not appreciating his ragged vocals as much as I enjoy many of the songs he’s written.  And I can imagine them being very indignant about it, as people who are passionate about any subject can become.  To calm my concocted critics, I’ll add this caveat: I do enjoy his singing on his debut album, the ingeniously titled Bob Dylan.  

In fact, I enjoy his singing on his eponymous first album — one of the few Dylan albums I owned previously — so much that I recently bought it on CD.  So, why do I like his singing on this album and not others?  In light of my previous post, I’ve been asking myself this question since my purchase.  I think I may have found an answer.

Unlike the singer’s subsequent albums, Bob Dylan contains very few original compositions, only two out of 13 songs.  At the time the record was recorded in 1961 (it was released in 1962), Dylan was known more for his eccentric performances in folk clubs than for his then still-burgeoning songwriting, although he was beginning to be recognized for that as well.  Consequently, most of the songs on Dylan’s debut album were coffee-shop standards, whether traditional folk songs or compositions by vintage bluesmen.  Of the two original tunes, one, “Talkin’ New York,” is a talking-blues song that isn’t dependent on a singing voice, while the other, “Song to Woody” (a tribute to his hero Woody Guthrie), is an early composition that doesn’t foretell its writer’s coming musical sophistication.  


In other words, the writer who would pen hooky melodies like “If Not for You” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” isn’t in evidence.  The songs that Dylan sings are elemental in their backroad origins and make use of only limited chord changes.  So, such rough-hewn tunes are a good fit with Dylan’s rough-hewn voice.


A compelling case in point is Dylan’s take on the Blind Lemon Jefferson song “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.”  Where Jefferson’s original version is solid but unruffled, Dylan’s raspy interpretation of the lyrics — “There’s one last favor I’ll ask of you/You can see that my grave is kept clean” — sounds like the final yelp of a perishing mortal actually in his last throes.  This lends the song a strong sense of desperation that Jefferson’s version only hints at.  The other regional songs on Bob Dylan also make good use of the singer’s scarred voice to convey the urgency of the lyrics.  


But after the singer’s eponymous debut album, his subsequent records featured his own songs, relegating traditional tunes to the occasional anomaly.  And his original songs — as all music lovers know — went well beyond the primitivism of the folk standards that inspired him.  On his own, Dylan came up with more intricate melodies whose chord changes created inspired passages that could instantly catch the listener’s ear.  Unfortunately, Dylan’s gift for writing melodies outgrew the mere functionality of his voice.  These songs now called for vocalists who could hit and give shape to these compelling notes and lyrics, something that Dylan’s straggly voice was seldom able to achieve.  


For example, compare the songwriter’s own vocalization of “If Not for You” to George Harrison’s cover version on his album All Things Must Pass.  Dylan’s original vocal only skims over the song’s melodic lines, not capturing every note, thus leaving a full vocalization more in the listener’s head than in the ear.  By contrast, Harrison’s cover (a version that many of the song’s fans consider definitive) gives unpretentious voice to all of the notes and does justice to every melodic line — in addition to boasting a buoyant acoustic-based arrangement.  The difference between the two versions is like that between a demo and a finished recording.  


If you like the way Bob Dylan sings, I don’t want to interfere with your enjoyment.  And I agree that, as with the case of the album Bob Dylan, there are certain kinds of songs where his abrasive voice is an asset.  But the talented tunesmith outpaced the singer’s pedestrian voice long ago.  I admire Dylan’s stature as a tireless and undaunted force in both music and popular culture.  But his songs now demand skillful singers who can give full voice to their tuneful melodies.  Bob Dylan’s captivating songs now demand a singer better than Bob Dylan.



Bob Dylan sings ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’

Westerns

John Wayne in ‘Stagecoach’ (1939)

Here is a recently rediscovered Internet article that I wrote back in 2001 for a website no longer on-line, an article that I thought was lost forever.  I wrote it not long after reading several books about western movies, among them The B.F.I. Companion to the Western and Sixguns and Society.  I also included some thoughts derived from Robert B. Ray in A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980.  I wasn’t as thorough with my ideas as I hoped to be (I have added some observations in brackets), but at least I got my comments back from Internet oblivion:

Movies deal with myths. And myths are a way for peoples and cultures to set up and play out the problems of life, survival, and sheer existence. For the full panorama on the importance of myth and its role in making sense of who we are as humans, I refer you to the books of the late, great Joseph Campbell. 

The genre of the western arose, I believe,  because Americans of European ancestry needed to make sense of their (our) existence in a “New World.” In particular, Euro-Americans were living in a land in which they were not the original inhabitants. So, Euro-American culture needed a mythology to shape and make sense of the conflicts of European survival in the New World. And in doing so, the ideology of such a mythology functioned, in part, to confirm the rightness of Euro-Americans to inhabit the North American continent over that of the indigenous people, the Native Americans. 


Why did Americans of European ancestry need a mythology? Because, I imagine, when North America started to be settled by white immigrants, they were not certain of their identity or the possibility of their survival on the continent. These uncertainties are best illustrated by Wener Herzog’s German film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), the story of an ill-fated mission by Spanish conquistadors in the Amazon jungle. Although the context is Latin American, Aguirre’s concerns are just as applicable to those in a North American context. Herzog’s film portrays a world where European culture seems inherently incompatable with the American continent. In the end, the American wilderness crushes the party of European adventurers, who are portrayed as petty and corrupt, unworthy of survival. Aguirre is the ultimate anti-western. If it was to survive, the European presence in America needed stories that affirmed the goodness and justness of white American culture and its worthiness to flourish. This is what the mythology of the western provided. 


As it arose and developed in both literature and film, the western taught its audience that the important problems of existence occupied a rural context, and that these problems needed to be solved through physical action, intelligently employed. Consequently, westerns are marked by their rural settings and their action-filled climaxes. Therefore, an action story set in an urban setting would have difficulty claiming to be a “western” as the gere is commonly understood (e.g., Coogan’s Bluff, Death Wish). And a story with a Wild West setting that is not resolved through a violent climax would likewise have trouble being seen as a western (e.g., The Ballad of Cable Hogue, The Good Old Boys).   


[In other words, the western is an action genre.  If the movie’s central problem isn’t solved by a shootout, a fist fight, or some other form of physical struggle, it’s not an action film — and hence not a western film.  I roll my eyes every time I hear Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) described as a “gay western.”  Since the film doesn’t end with an action scene — in fact, there’s hardly any violence in it at all — the label “western” doesn’t do justice to this drama.  Now, if the film had been about Jesse James getting it on with Billy the Kid...]


[Although there are exceptions, the typical western is set in some place (specific or non-specific) on the North American continent west of the Mississippi River sometime between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century.  Why this time period?  Like other film critics, I believe that the overwhelming majority of westerns are set after the Civil War because the United States needed to overcome its founding flaw of slavery and the national disunity that schismatic issue provoked.  Only afterwards could the mythology of a truly unified country develop.  In many westerns, lingering resentments over the “War for the Southern Confederacy” emerge, only to be resolved by the end of the story.  And the 1890s marked the end of the Indian wars.  Afterwards, the continental United States was officially settled.]

Gary Cooper in ‘High Noon’ (1952)

Another intriguing aspect of the genre is that the classical western hero, usually a cowboy or gunfighter, exists at the intersection of civilization and the wilderness. He (the western hero is almost always male, of course) is seen to embody the best of both worlds: the intelligence and expansionism of civilization, and the instinctiveness and brute strength of the wilderness. He can’t be completely one or the other. This is why the sixgun is so important to the wilderness-dwelling western hero: it marks his primary connection to and reliance upon Western civilization, of which he is a harbinger on the frontier. 

It’s very interesting, for example, that the mythology of the western did not develop to privilege “going native” narratives, where Europeans or their descendents completely cast off Western culture and adopt Native American culture (even James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans remained resolutely tied to his white identity). To do so, of course, would have suggested that Western culture was somehow inherently suspect, and the purpose of the western genre was to convey exactly the opposite. The classical western hero needed to be bound to his European roots. So, even though there have been a few successful “going native” westerns — particularly Little Big Man (1970), A Man Called Horse (1970), and Dances with Wolves (1990) — this is not the mainstream of the western movie.

In fact, Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse were made during the Vietnam era, when many Americans were questioning the very validity of Euro-American culture, and these films are a reflection of that crisis of identity. Apparently, the “going native” mythology was so threatening to the legitimacy of Euro-American culture that America’s most successful and enduring rendition of the “going native” myth — Tarzan — had to be set on another continent. 

Although the western, at its core, affirms that white people are more deserving to live in America than the Indians are, this isn’t necessarily to say that all westerns are overwhelmingly racist — no more so than other mythologies that seek to affirm the European presence in the non-European world. Because he exits at the crossroads of Western culture and the wilderness (to which that culture stands in contradistinction), the western hero may be seen as an implicit critique of Western civilization, as well as its harbinger on the frontier. The western hero may stand as an ideal symbol of rural Euro-American culture before it became “corrupted” by the more impersonal forces of urban civilization. Therefore, not only can the western hero be the uncritical champion of Euro-American civilization, but he may also function as a figure of resistance to it. 

Because of this, it’s not all that surprising that when American culture reached its greatest identity crisis of the second half of the 20th century — the quagmire of the Vietnam War and the counterculture that crisis spawned — the outfits and hairstyles of the counterculture drew largely from the western: blue jeans, denim jackets, cowboy hats, long hair, droopy moustaches, etc. For example, the two main characters of that exemplary “counterculture” movie Easy Rider (1969) were both named after western icons: Wyatt (as in “Earp”) and Billy (as in “the Kid”). So, the Vietnam-era “counterculture” was at least as beholden to the western mythos as it was critical of its expansionist ideology, of which the Vietnam War was seen as an extension. At the same time, the Vietnam Era (the 1960s and ’70s), marked an upsurge in revisionist westerns: Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), etc. — films which criticize the western myth, but also may be seen to affirm it in other ways. 

‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969)

I think the primary reason why big-screen westerns aren’t being made as often as they used to is because American ideology now views contemporary problems primarily in an urban and technological context. Also, the crisis of the Vietnam War may have tarnished the rugged “purity” of the frontier setting: in light of the war, the American frontier of the 19th century came to look increasingly like just another European military expansion into the Third World, rather than the mythic landscape for the triumph of white American culture. In other words, the western lost its innocence.

In any event, Euro-American culture no longer seems to be uncertain of its legitimacy to inhabit North America, so that crisis of identity may now have been played out and resolved — at least in a rural, pre-computer-age context. This would explain why the urban/gangster thriller and the science-fiction adventure have now displaced the western as Hollywood’s primary action genres.  However, the mythic images of the western — the idea of a rugged loner drawing upon his best resources and physical strength to resolve a great crisis in an “unspoiled” landscape — remain too powerful to die out completely, even in the imaginations of those who aren't white, aren't American, or aren't male. Westerns are still being made, though primarily for television. And the occasional big-screen western still makes its appearance, such as this year’s [2001]  American Outlaws. Because it is so basic to the shaping of the American identity, the western — in some way, in some form — will always be with us.