On the Environment, Hollywood, and "Jeremiah Johnson"
There are at least three reasons that Hollywood isn't good at, or really interested in, environmentalism.
The first is the most structural and the least interesting. The stories that movies tell well are centered on people. They rely for their impact on human dilemmas, human interaction, human conundrums; this means that the natural works well as a setting for movies, but less well as a topic or (despite what the pull-quotes from so many film reviews assure us) a character itself. On top of this, the film medium is primarily a visual one. In prose, one can speculate on what might happen inside the consciousness of an animal (or the consciousness of a tree, if we're to believe Peter Wohlleben), leading us through what the author believes it might actually feel like to be an animal or a tree; this is far harder to do in a visual medium. So the structure of the art form of (narrative) filmmaking itself makes it difficult to tell stories about the environment around us.
The second reason is both more interesting and more endemic to American society as a whole, beyond just Hollywood: it's difficult to tell stories about something you are unfamiliar with. The majority of folks in the film industry, like the majority of Americans, spend little time in nature. This is both a matter of duration and of approach. Spending a week riding around in jeeps (or on horses) and eating fine meals at a friend's ranch outside of Jackson Hole represents exactly the same amount of exposure to the natural world as does taking a vacation to Yellowstone Park, or zooming around on a snowmobile, or spending a week at the beach. One is in nature but not necessarily involved with it; one is experiencing it as a diversion, or a kind of zoo exhibit one gets to walk around in, or as a place that exists to serve one's own needs for relaxation or to stir a sense of wonderment. What one is not doing is actually interacting with the natural world.
This does not breed understanding so much as the fascination of the ill-informed dilettante; it's the reason for films like The Revenant, in which nature (or perhaps, as the film would have it, "NATURE!!!") is presented as something alien to us in its scale and somehow at the same time homogenized in that grandeur ("GRANDEUR, GODDAMNIT!!!" the film seems to scream at us), such that we're supposed to just pretend we don't notice as Leo DiCaprio staggers along from one location to a second that is in reality thousands of miles away, sometimes switching from one continent to another in the course of a single sequence (the film was shot in both North and South America).
Actually, most moviegoers don't notice this, and the filmmakers clearly didn't, because they aren't aware that the flora on eastern slope and western slope drainages of the Rocky Mountains differs appreciably, as does the flora and geography of different elevations, as does the goddamn flora and geography of entirely different continents. Nature differs just as widely as do human beings; insisting that all mountain settings are pretty much the same is very much like insisting that all Africans or Australians or Asians are pretty much the same.
In part, this is just the filmmaking business. John Carpenter filmed Halloween in the L.A. area because he didn't have the budget or inclination to travel to the film's Midwest location, and this is clear to the attentive viewer (towns in the Midwest don't usually support lots of big Ficus trees, and schools in the Midwest don't have outdoor lockers); but he at least worked hard to try to make Pasadena look like Illinois. When many filmmakers shoot nature, on the other hand, they don't even bother to try for anything other than effect. And they often succeed: there are plenty of movies in which the natural world feels big and awe-inspiring and dangerous and beautiful and all the rest; but it is, once again, a setting, not a topic.
The third reason has less to do with Hollywood itself than the times we live in. Ours is a moment of maximal consumption and maximal mediation. Even among the young, one gets the sense that the most pressing question as regards climate change is how to allow us to continue to live exactly as we do while just reforming our industrial processes so that they’re a little cleaner.
Which is to say that there is little contemporary concern with the environment as an entity in and of itself, as compared with something that serves as a foundation upon which we can build the kinds of lives we want, filled with all of the adventures we want to have and the things we want to buy. When I mention to young Americans that it would be absolutely unsustainable in environmental terms for everyone in the world to enjoy the standard of living that they do, they respond with blank stares that border on hostility; when people talk about issues like deforestation in Brazil, it's in terms of the danger that deforestation poses to human progress, as though those forests have value only in terms of their function as a carbon sink, rather than any intrinsic value.
This is compounded by the mediation of our lives, in which the vast majority of interactions, experiences, and even the fabric of existence itself is conducted through, or interwoven with, electronic and mechanical devices. If you think about the amount of time you exist with and through your phone, computer, smart speaker, television, car, tablet, earbuds, and the rest, and then compare this to the amount of time you spend not with these things, you will probably discover that the only time you spend not surrounded by electric contrivances of one sort or another comes at three moments: when you are asleep (those of you, that is, who don't need (or "need") white noise machines), when you are wishing you could get back to your electric contrivances, and after you are dead.
And what's fascinating is that this mediation of our experience through the electronic has generated virtually no pushback. At other moments in our history, there have been movements that urged us to give up these contrivances, and go "back to the land." For better or worse, no such movement seems to currently exist on any non-negligible scale.
Is all of this something to bemoan? Is it simply the course of the future? Who knows. But it does help explain, I think, the reasons that the so-called "environmentalist" fare coming out of Hollywood these days consists of things like the occasional big-budget disaster flick, the Oscar-bait low key drama about some poor community being subjected to environmental degradation via a malicious corporation, or the inspirational tale about someone rediscovering their ability to function in the human world by going on a journey where they sleep in a tent and cook on a fire and get blisters on their feet…after which they return to that human/mechanical world as fast as they possibly can.
Jeremiah Johnson, released in 1972 and directed by Sydney Pollock, is now probably best known to a large segment of the population because it spawned a meme on the internet; such is the state of our cultural consciousness that when the kids found out that the guy in the meme was Robert Redford and not Zach Galifianakis, they freaked out in the way that only modern kids can.
Snark aside, it's not surprising, and fascinatingly symbolic, that the entire modern world of the internet would have no space in its brain for the Redford character; this is because the film seems to come from not just another time, but another universe.
Redford plays the eponymous hero of the story, a veteran of the Mexican-American War who journeys to Montana to become a mountain man (the term is a noun with a specific meaning, not a vaguely descriptive adjective). He buys some horses and a trapping outfit, finds a .50 caliber rifle clutched in the hands of a man who froze to death after being mauled by a grizzly, and generally does not acquit himself very well – being a greenhorn – until he meets an older trapper named "Bear Claw" Chris Lapp (Will Geer) who shows him the ropes.
As he gains experience of his own, Johnson becomes something of a notable presence in the mountains. He takes charge of an orphaned boy and then rescues another mountain man, named Del Gue (Stefan Gierasch), from sure death at the hands of a group of Blackfeet Indians; this leads to a series of interactions and misunderstandings that wind up with Johnson married to a woman named Swan (Delle Bolton), who's the daughter of a local Flathead Indian chief.
For a brief moment, everything is roses. Johnson, Swan, and the boy Caleb build a cabin in the mountains and establish the beginnings of a bucolic family life. This idyll disintegrates when Johnson agrees to escort some U.S. Cavalry troops to rescue a stranded wagon train; against his better judgement, the commander of the troops convinces Johnson to take a shorter route that leads through a sacred Crow burial ground. On his return from the trip, Johnson discovers that a party of Crow warriors has killed Swan and Caleb.
He hunts down that party and kills all of them but one; this in turn leads to a kind of war between Johnson and the Crow tribe, in which one after another warrior tries to kill him. As time passes, this war takes its toll on Johnson, while also making him into something of a folk legend in the area, a man who many others aren't sure really exists. By the time the war is called off by a Crow chief in the movie's final sequence, it's clear that this legend has come to define Johnson, and that we’re being urged to see him as bearing a kind of symbolic significance in the mythic history of both the American West and the nation itself.
It's difficult to say anything cogent about Jeremiah Johnson without first acknowledging the historical context in which it was produced. The Vietnam war was still going on – nightly news shows included segments detailing the number of young Americans killed in the war that day – the tumult and assassinations associated with the Civil Rights era were a daily reality for viewers, and the siege at Wounded Knee would take place some three months after the film had its American opening in New York City.
In other words, the shine had come off the so-called American experiment. The self-image of a prosperous, world-leading, justice-bringing democracy that had been so prevalent in the wake of World War II had been replaced by a kind of cultural disillusionment, and this was finding a foothold in Hollywood. Sam Peckinpah was making films that aimed to demolish the viewer's sense of the romanticism of violence; films from Point Blank and Bonnie and Clyde to Across 110th Street and The Long Goodbye were working to strip some of the last varnish from the theatrics of the American crime film; horror films, like Last House on the Left, Sisters, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, were increasingly taking as their subject matter either explicit or symbolic issues of national social discord.
This coincided with a newfound sense of what was to be called "environmentalism." If human society was corrupt, perhaps the goal should be to escape that society and to preserve the natural world because it represented a better, more actualized alternative. The first Earth Day was held in the spring of 1970, Greenpeace was founded in 1971, Rainbow Family gatherings began at about the same moment, surfing, rock-climbing, camping, and backpacking enjoyed a moment of cultural vogue, and the notion of quitting urban life to found a commune in the country (which Americans had been doing, for reasons both religious and not, for hundreds of years) suddenly didn't seem so bizarre.
It is from this milieu that Jeremiah Johnson emerges, and what the film shows is both how sincere in its belief that moment was, and how far from us it is now.
Some of this is simply a result of the filmmaking. What Sydney Pollock thought about nature, I do not know. But he managed to represent it as well as one can, I think, in the context of star-centered Hollywood filmmaking. There are a few moments in which Redford rides down the side of a mountain and then a single cut takes him to somewhere that's clearly in an entirely different biosphere (the film was shot almost entirely in Utah, although it still uses a fairly wide variety of locations); but for the most part, it gives the sense of taking place in a single geographic area.
Which is to say that it feels as though Johnson is interacting with a specific environment, rather than the overawing all-caps NATURAL WORLD that so many filmmakers put on screen.
And the story that the film sets into this environment is a beguilingly simple one. As my lovely partner noted after watching the film with me, despite the charms of the sparse dialogue (the script is credited to Edward Anhalt and John Milius, and the implications of Milius's contributions are well worth exploring, but that's a complicated topic and one for another time) it's a film that could be watched with the sound off without virtually any loss of comprehension about the events.
We watch Johnson interact with his environment – trying to figure out how to catch fish or make a fire or build a cabin – and because it is a place of specifics, rather than generalities, the story too becomes a specific one, and understandable. It is not a tale of "man vs. nature," but of a single man engaging with a single place.
Additionally, the human denizens of this place – the mountain men, as well as the various native tribes – exist in a community, sparse and spread out though they may be. They know who each other are, and are enmeshed in a web of relationships (Johnson is married to a Flathead woman, for example, and antagonistic with the Crow). They understand the rules of the terrain, and the rules of interacting with one another. The impression this gives the viewer is of human life enmeshed in the natural world, rather than alien to it.
What makes this particularly interesting for today's viewer is not simply the vision (or metaphor) all of this creates, but the degree of sincerity and faith the story puts into this vision. Johnson is a war vet, and it is intimated that he’s trying to recover from the horrors of that experience. This theme of trying to recover from trauma is a common one in '70s American cinema, for the obvious reason of the historical events I mentioned above. And the particular balm that Jeremiah Johnson investigates – that of trying to reconnect (or connect for the first time) with the larger natural world – also frequently pops up in that cinema.
But the film doesn't suggest that this is an easy, therapeutic solution: Johnson goes into the mountains, and does indeed find peace for a moment. But that peace is shattered when his wife and adopted son are killed. This tragedy is brought about, importantly, not by nature itself, but by human conflict (the way the story fits into American narratives about the native peoples of the Rocky Mountains is another complicated topic for another time). One does not get the idea from this that nature is good and humans are evil, but simply that life is difficult and complicated and tends to not give you what you want.
Returning to the land is perhaps a start, but certainly not a solution; the film does not overstate the remedy any more than it overplays the landscape.
It is, in this sense, a mature story, and anti-heroic in its own way. It’s the kind of artwork produced by a culture wracked by a war they could not ignore, tormented by internal injustice, by senseless violence, and by a growing awareness of the difficulty of believing in its own propaganda. Its tone is not celebratory so much as wistful; it does not trade in enthusiasm or self-fulfillment so much as it does in a recognition that trying to deal valiantly with inevitable difficulty is about the most that can be hoped for.
This last ties to one of the deepest and, to the modern viewer, most discordant elements of the movie, which is its attempt to recall (or perhaps to create) a feeling of American mythos. The visuals and story itself begin this process, but it’s maybe best embodied by the several iterations of a song about Johnson, sung by Tim McIntire, that run through the film.
These are done in the style of a folk ballad, complete with winsome fiddle lines and down-home vocal intonations. The lyrics strive for an old-timey, larger-than-life feeling, as if we’re watching an origin story in which a hero of the land is born: "Jeremiah Johnson made his way into the mountains / Bettin’ on forgettin’ all the troubles that he knew / The trail was wide and narrow, and the eagle or the sparrow / Showed the path he was to follow as they flew."
The attempt is clearly to tie the movie (which is based on a true story, or as true a story as it is possible to tell about this period in American history) into the kind of rural legends that at one point seemed definitive in American culture, from Daniel Boone to Br'er Rabbit, from Cotton Mather to the Headless Horseman, from Sacagawea to Annie Oakley, and all the rest of them.
It is not, I think, the attempt to create this kind of mythos that is so strikingly odd today. What else have the franchises been trying to cram down our gullets for some twenty years now?
It is, instead, the specifics of that mythos. In 1972, it seems, it was still possible to imagine America as a place that would accept, as a part of its foundational self-image, the tale of a person who turns to the natural world for meaning, and finds there that meaning itself is difficult, finds that life, as wonderful and maddening as it can be, is not a fairy tale of inevitable triumph but a process of discovering that the odds are truly and forever stacked against you.
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