No Thought Is Binding: "Fort Apache"

I've been thinking about thought lately. More specifically, I've been thinking about the purpose of this journal, in which I offer my so-called "Thoughts Mostly About Film."

That purpose is not – despite the frequent certainty of my tone – to make definitive arguments. Nor is it to provide qualitative assessments of movies (ie. "100 Movies You Have To Watch Before You Die!") as I believe that mission often leads to confusion: what we’re talking about when we talk about the greatness or awfulness of a film is usually not the film itself but what we mean by "greatness" or "awfulness."

The purpose of this journal, rather, is simply to think. To watch a movie, think about it, and then try to put into words as clearly as possible my reactions: what I've seen and what I've thought and some of the meaning that might emerge from those things. The movies I choose are those that strike me as being capable of offering something interesting to think about; when I write here I'm more or less thinking out loud, as it were.

And thinking is (for me) transient. It's a matter of a spark leading to a light that illuminates an area that has been obscured; of a continually shifting current, like that of the sea, pulling you in first one direction and then another, sometimes in to shore and sometimes out to danger; of experiment and play and exploration and direction-change.

This notion of thought also (for me) synchronizes with one of the fascinating things about film: many movies offer new vistas or visions each time you re-watch them.

This is not about quality. I consider Aliens a very fine film (and one that can bear up under a lot of thinking), but re-watching it for me is more of a matter of sinking into the old familiar than it is of struggling with it anew. I also consider Deep Red and La Notte and All About Eve very fine films, but they are less stable for me. Despite the fact that the images and sounds in these movies have not changed from one viewing to the next, the movies themselves, like my thought, very much seem to have changed. They are not the same as they were. Have their meanings shifted, or is it me? It's a question for the ontologists, perhaps.

But it leads me to a motto for this journal, and to an observation. The motto I have in mind (until I change my mind, of course) is: "No thought is binding."

In the context of art if the purpose is to think, then one cannot be bound. Because if one is bound, then one risks not thinking; one risks, instead, becoming ossified by the already-existing; one risks sitting complacently behind the walls of an extant structure, pedantically explaining how every new phenomenon actually proves that one has been right all along; one risks missing out on the infinite complexities of the world (and what is the world if not infinitely complex?) by trying to conform those complexities to dogma.

The observation is that the notion that no thought is binding is exactly what allows historically and politically difficult films to be so valuable.

Fort Apache, from 1948, seems to me like a good deal of John Ford's post-war work to be almost perfectly unified by his aesthetic vision and at the same time a deeply fractured film, cut through by conflict and paradox and schism.

It tells the story of the soldiers at the titular fort in the American southwest sometime in the 1870s and, less directly, of the Apaches they're in conflict with.

At the opening of the film, Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) shows up to take command of the fort, with his daughter Philadelphia (Shirley Temple) in tow. He's an inflexible, arrogant man who knows nothing about the indigenous people of the region despite loathing them, is vaguely contemptuous of the Irish Americans who make up a good deal of his own command, and hates the war theater of the West because he feels it's beneath his talents.

At Fort Apache, Thursday finds a complexly interwoven group of people. Captain Kirby York (John Wayne) is an experienced officer who (like most of the men in the film, including Thursday) served in the Civil War. He also has a deep knowledge of and respect for the Apaches.

Sgt. Major Michael O'Rourke (Ward Bond) is an NCO whose receipt of the Medal of Honor during the Civil War has allowed his son Michael (John Agar) to win a presidential appointment to West Point. The younger Michael has just graduated and returned to the fort (where he spent much of his childhood) as a young Second Lieutenant, putting him in command not only of his father, but also of the tight-knit group of soldiers who knew him as a boy. The wives of these men are also very much present, in particular Mary O'Rourke (Irene Rich) who is Sgt. O'Rourke's wife and Lt. O'Rourke's mother.

The main action of the film follows two lines of plot. The first involves Lt. O'Rourke and Philadelphia falling in love. This offends the class-conscious Thursday, who doesn't consider the son of an enlisted man sufficient for the likes of his daughter.

The second plotline revolves around the fact that a group of Apaches led by Cochise (Miguel Inclan) have left their reservation because of the depredation of the government-appointed agent who administers it (Grant Withers). Sensing a chance to score a public relations victory that will get him promoted out of the fort, Thursday decides to force the Apaches back to the reservation. York, who knows Cochise and respects him, offers to parley; at this meeting he manages to convince Cochise to bring his tribe back under a flag of safe conduct.

But Thursday, for whom the Apaches are "savages," breaks York's promise and rides out in force with troops from the fort. When he meets with Cochise, he declares there will be no negotiations and no safe conduct. The Apaches will either submit or Thursday will wipe them out. The Apaches do not submit.

Thursday sends York and the younger O'Rourke to the rear as punishment for daring to question his decisions and then leads the troopers into the fight. Thursday and all men he takes with him are overrun and killed. Cochise lets York, O'Rourke, and a few others survive.

There's a brief postscript in which York, now in charge of Fort Apache, is interviewed by some reporters from the East Coast. The reporters repeat the falsehoods that have sprung up about the affair: that Thursday was a hero, and that he died gallantly in the protection of the civilizing advancement of the United States. York does not correct them. Instead, he delivers a speech about the fact that the real value of military life lies in the ordinary, enlisted men of the Army, before introducing the reporters to Philadelphia and Lt. O'Rourke, now happily married, and their young son, the charmingly named Michael Thursday York O'Rourke.

It seems to me true, as Richard Slotkin has argued in great detail, that the Western genre is important because of the degree to which it addresses foundational American mythology. Many elements of this myth (which are also among Ford's principal and career-long obsessions) are present here. And their terms – their costs, implications, and meanings – are perhaps most centrally the things the film is gnawing at, as well as the things that most deeply fracture it.

One of these elements is the battle between civilization and wilderness. An integral part of American mythology is the presentation of our history as the triumph of the former over the latter, as the continuing westward march of progress over savagery. (I should note here, and will note again, that arguing that this mythos is extant does not mean endorsing it.)

Importantly, in Ford's view here and elsewhere, our civilization consists not only of historical and technical "progress," but also a certain kind of domesticity. The film features not one but two dances, which Ford frequently uses to present a vision of peaceful community life. At a dance, that is, we are not out killing one another in the name of abstract ideals like progress and nation; we are instead making merry, engaging in things like fellowship and romance that are, perhaps for Ford, the highest accomplishments of our species.

And dances are in Ford's film's almost explicitly feminine-oriented endeavors. This is as much a matter of costuming as it is of gender roles. The masculine is dusty, disheveled and violent; the feminine is orderly, neat, peaceful and respectably dressed. At stake is not simply the question of whether the women of the fort (and the frontier, and America, by extension) can tame the men's violent impulses; at stake is also the question of what kind of civilization those impulses are meant to defend or, maybe more accurately, to impose on the folks American society sees as uncivilized.

In this film these folks are, of course, the Apaches. In one way, as I've noted, Fort Apache is very much a romance film, telling the story of a love that overcomes both class divisions and the historical tumult of its time. In another way, Fort Apache – here one notes the oddness of the name, for forts are built to defend, and what kind of fort is it that is defending the Apaches? – is very directly a war film, telling of the colonial subversion of a people. This language – "colonial subversion" – is of course loaded. One might also talk about it as a war film depicting "the clash between two mighty nations." But I think the notion of colonial subversion is more accurate (although not definitively accurate) to one of the most confounding psychological divisions of the proceedings.

If one of the primary elements of the American mythos is the question of civilization versus wilderness, then one of the central terms of this question is that folks of European descent were thought to represent civilization, while folks of indigenous descent were thought to represent wilderness.

That is, the cultural and physical subjugation – not to mention the attempted extirpation – of the Native Americans was thought to be justified as it advanced the interests of civilization itself. Manifest Destiny, the steady striding of progress, the American vision of itself as a beacon for virtue;– this could only come when the people standing against it were either made to believe in that virtue or wiped off the face of the earth.

You will notice, then, that we have a fascinating parallel being constructed:

1. the feminine = civilization; the masculine = violence

2. whites = civilization; Native Americans = wilderness

If one is familiar with American history, one sees the echoes of this myth resounding throughout. (Which is entirely different than agreeing with those elements, once again, or feeling that they need to be changed.)

And where the Western film is so important, and unbound thought so valuable, is in trying to work through the terms on which all this plays out in the film.

Fort Apache is often referred to as one of the first movies to be "sympathetic" to Native Americans. (This is perhaps the case, but it's also an extraordinary statement, given the predominance of Westerns in early American filmmaking: it means that before Ford's western, a vast amount of American cinema was devoted to the notion that Native Americans needed to be killed or forcibly assimilated.)

But in what ways is it sympathetic? Complicated ways, to say the least. Consider the score of the film. It assigns to the Apaches a kind of standard-issue tomahawk-chop, beat on the tom-toms theme that plays each time they appear. This is not an incidental element. It consigns a culture to a group with which it may or may not have any similarities, reducing Apaches to "Indians" rather than seeing them as having individuating characteristics.

That is, through generic "Indian music" the Apaches become simply a "them," which is one of the exact ways that social groups insulate themselves psychologically against their own depredations. It's a form of propaganda, that is, cuing the white audience to be ready for violence and at the same time reassuring it that that violence is justified.

Henry Fonda's character Thursday becomes the mouthpiece for this view. He sees the Apaches as sub-human savages who deserve no human dignity. But this is also where the complications begin. Because Fonda is also bigoted toward the Irish-Americans under his command, continually forgetting their names and just using any old Irish name that comes to mind – early in the film, for example, he refers to the younger O'Rourke as first "O'Brien" and then "Murphy."

Thursday is also nakedly antagonistic to people he sees as lower class, at one point telling the elder O'Rourke and his wife to their faces that their son isn't well-bred enough for his daughter Philadelphia. Finally, he's a paragon of chauvinism, absolutely controlling Philadelphia and, on the symbolic level, only participating in the film's dances when he’s forced to by military rectitude.

In these ways, the film is clearly aware of the fascinating symmetries suggested by the equations I listed above. If both feminine qualities and the Native Americans are opposed to the militant masculinity of American civilization, does that mean that those qualities are allied?

Put differently, there’s a way in which Thursday's attitude towards the Apaches, women, the poor, and the Irish (who were seen, if you'll recall, as not fully "white" during the 19th and early 20th centuries) serves to suggest a kind of symbolic or mythic alliance between those groups. In this context, it seems to me not incidental that Thursday's daughter is named Philadelphia. The birthplace of the American experiment is female, falls in love with a lower-class Irish fellow, and is resistant to the most domineering man in the film...yet she's also his daughter.

There's also the matter of York's attitude toward the Apaches, which is that of a soldier toward a respected and honorable enemy. York knows that Cochise is a man of his word; he argues that the Apaches are better soldiers and better commanded than the U.S. forces; and in ways both subtle and overt he thinks they are more principled than is Thursday. York, in short, sees the Apaches as fully "civilized" people, possessing all of those values by which he measures humanity - it’s Thursday he finds wanting.

The film's visual depiction of the Apaches in some senses buttresses this view. The camera treats them with dignity. The violence they engage in is clearly presented as a reaction to injustice, both in the scenes in which we meet the odious man who administers the reservation and in the scene where Cochise explains how they’ve been treated on that reservation. Their martial ability – in a film that values this highly – is celebrated, as demonstrated through a series of shots late in the film showing them preparing for Thursday's doomed charge. We know before the fight even begins that the Apaches are tactically superior and will triumph.

Which brings us back to the notion of the kind of war film it is, and why I referred to it as a film of colonial subversion. The Apaches are presented as the defenders against incursion into their land. This idea is expressed in dialogue but also in the visual and symbolic action: Thursday's charge is conducted against an entrenched body of men, lying in the rocks waiting for him. At the end of the film, in other words, it's the Apache who are in a fort, which the U.S. cavalry is attacking; this is a neat reversal of the mythology of the film's titular location (forts are where whites defend themselves against the depredations of marauders) as well as another fascinating gloss on the film's title.

In case all of this complication isn't enough, there's also the matter of the most visually striking shot in the film, which seems to me to sum up a good deal of the paradox of the workings.

How are we to read this image? Accidental it is not: this took a good deal of effort on the part of the filmmaker to set up. York greets Cochise in peace and respect, but the barrel of the rifle points at Cochise’s head. Is it an image of tragic foreshadowing, a despairing vision of what will happen to the Apaches after the movie is over, and what did happen to the Native American in America and Hollywood and elsewhere? Or is it an image representing a claim about what was necessary for civilization to triumph?

It is, I think, both. The film is neither definitively sympathetic to the Apaches, nor definitively on the side of the people who argue that dominance, violence and subjugation have been inherent to the development of American culture; it's on both sides at once.

To slip into contemporary language for a moment, the film participates in "white privilege" in that it assumes the American story is a story told from the point of view of white folks; it gives to them the privilege of working out their psychological and socio-historical issues on the screen, as if those issues are the issues of the culture itself, rather than the issues of one element of that culture.

But in this it also suggests another way of reading Western movies: not (only) as a mode of investigating the roots of the American myth, but as a record of the submerged psychology of human beings who have assumed a position of dominance. Perhaps, that is, we should be thinking of Westerns as documents of pathology, anxiety, repression, examples of the way that human beings justify both personal and societal-level violence and the strange psychological riving that results from this justification.

In the end, Ford is stuck in paradox. He cannot escape the fact that the values he espouses are grounded on the myth he seems to be trying to grapple with. His valorization of martial virtues, York's speech at the end celebrating the common soldier, Ford’s depictions of masculine and feminine roles;– all of these arise from, and are inextricable from, the things Ford seems to be trying to work against: dehumanization, racism, classicism, blind arrogance, and subservience to useless stricture.

A final way to underscore these contradictions is to note that the whole film is a reference to the annihilation of General Custer at Little Bighorn, and that the irony of that event suffuses it throughout.

Custer, who finished dead last in his class at West Point, was certain that the American soldier was supreme and believed in the glorious course of American history (and the glorious cause of himself) with an almost religious fervor. His famed "last stand" in which his command was wiped out by fighters from the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, took place in June of 1876. During that summer, America was also hosting its first World's Fair.

Titled the Centennial Exposition, this was meant to showcase the American ideal of progress and prosperity. The news of Custer's death served as a terrible, paralyzing shock when it reached the grounds of the Exposition, stabbing fear into the heart of the dream of American dominance. And yet it was also nearly immediately turned into a symbolic act of heroism, as the country could not for long countenance the notion that it could suffer defeat at the hands of a “lesser” culture. (As ironic evidence of this, one notes the glorification of his outfit, the 7th Cavalry, as late as the Vietnam war, which had a similar and also temporary effect on American self-confidence.) Defeat becomes victory, York’s respect for the annihilated people becomes Ford’s respect for the people who annihilated them. And should I mention that the Centennial Exposition took place, of course, in Philadelphia?

There is no single way to understand these things. My talk of paradox is not flippant. A unified set of ideas regarding all of this is untenable.

The best one can do is watch, and think, and watch again, and think again (and enjoy cinema), treating each past viewing and each past thought as perhaps worthwhile or perhaps entirely wrongheaded.

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