Great piece, man. So glad to have you back. I've lived in the US but I'm not from the US, so I don't think I've much to offer here, save perhaps an observation:
Mistrust of institutions/faith in individuals seems to be a runninng theme in US films, even the ones you mentioned. Institutions tend to be presented as imperfect at best and corrupt to the core at worst. But the message seems to be that there will always be an extraordinary individual whose purity of heart and indomitable spirit will lead them to generate permanent change for the benefit of all, in spite of the insurmountable odds stacked against them. I wonder if this doesn't help explain the Trump cult, the other side of the Mr. Smith coin: an outsider (but not really), with no ties to the establishment (but not really), fighting for the little guy (but not really), saying things like "I alone can fix it", and having it resonate...
I think your analysis is spot on. To my way of thinking, there's a deep anti-institutional streak in American culture, running all the way through its politics and art, including cinema. I think the roots of it lie in the American myth of the rugged pioneer pushing ever westward, entirely responsible for his own livelihood. Research has long shown that this is indeed a myth - the vast majority of people involved in the westward expansion of the nation were dependent on other people, for it was communities, not individuals, that mainly ventured westward - but the idea/image of the strong (if atomised) individual got lodged really deeply in the American psyche. For me, the beneficial side of it (if that's the right term) is that it creates a deep suspicion of power; the downside is that it absolutely makes Americans vulnerable to charismatic individuals promising various forms of salvation.
What's interesting about Trump, I think, in this sense, is that a lot of these figures have tended to be religious - from John Edwards to Joseph Smith to the big name evangelical preachers of the '80s through today - and have confined their messages to the spiritual space, and of late the culture-war space. But Trump is one of the only (as far as I know) to be explicitly anti-democratic. This might be, again, why he feels so strange to so many people: radical religion (particularly in the evangelical framework) has long attended the culture, but anti-democratic attacks of this sort are much less familiar to us.
That's interesting. That placing of the individual above institutions also seems to paradoxically work as a defense of the status quo. If the right person is all it takes ti fix things, then the problem is not with the instituions but with the person or people in charge of them. No need for systemic change.
I've been very surprised by how quickly and without so much as a second's thought the Trump cultists have abandoned what have historically been some of their key principles: strict Constitutionality, tough on crime, no one is above the law, the military and law enforcement are sacrosanct... it's almost as if those things mean something very specific to them, and something completely different to everyone else.
Definitely. I also think the resistance to systemic change has a lot to do with American exceptionalism. The notion that America is the greatest country in the world - as opposed to just one country among many, which happens to be the place where I was born and which thus did a great deal to shape me, which is the reason why I'm partial to it - becomes an easy excuse for resistance to any kind of systemic change. And the individualistic bent of the society - the idea of America as "the home of the free" (individual) – is deeply intertwined with that notion.
As far as the right's capitulation to things that a few years ago would have seemed anathema to them, I too have been surprised. What I have no idea about is how much of that has to do with the psychology/specific experiences of the people who support the movement. I know there are a lot of arguments/studies out there about difference in the way the brains of liberals and conservatives work - how they process information, where they do that processing in their brains, etc. - but I also think that for the vast majority of people out there, regardless of left/right persuasion, political principles are secondary to desired results. Far too many people are willing to rationalize what "their" side does, regardless of what they were claiming their principles to be yesterday. Having said that, one of the real dangers, imho, of Trump and the MAGA faction is that they're willing to push outside the traditional boundaries of what's politically and culturally American, and have managed to leverage themselves into a place in which that's possible.
Exceedingly well put, man. It really is good to have you back.
And I agree 100%. I believe that most people cling to their political beliefs when it favors them to do so, and discard them when they are no longer convenient, which is why democracy is such a fragile thing. It needs constant love, care and attention if it is to even have a chance at succeeding. To most people, it is simply a means to an end. If that system doesn't work, bring on the next.
Rights in the abstract are no substitute for quality of life to most people, and while I don't blame them one iota for feeling that way, I do blame them for relishing the opportunity to hurt marginalized groups and communities on the off chance that it might possibly provide them with some tangential individual benefit at some point down the line. This is something I deal with on a daily basis in my professional life and, well... the only reason my own country hasn't wound up with a Trump/Bolsonaro/Bukele/Orban has been sheer dumb luck. But that is absolutely where things are trending right now....
Great to hear from you. Hope your Hollywood adventures are treating you well.
As usual, loved your insights. Even flawed heroes put themselves out there to build a world where its citizens are free to make their own happiness, and Trump certainly does not.
By way of total coincidence, I actually posted a piece on my own site this week that also looked at the myths of the American cowboy.
The essay is me responding to The Power of the Dog, a movie I wasn't particularly impressed with, tracing how I feel the film, and larger culture, casts the archetypal cowboy as just a MAGA fantasy when the classical western's relationship between masculinity, violence, and heroism was a lot more intricate than all that. I felt it had some overlapping points with some thoughts you shared here, and I'd be interested to know if you had any reaction to it.
I really liked the piece on "The Power of the Dog." I haven't seen it, so I don't have any ideas about it, but the way you laid it out doesn't surprise me. I wonder sometimes about the roots of this moral simplicity that seems to be snaking through so much of our art; I haven't thought much about what the origins of it might be, but it certainly seems prevalent.
I thought the piece had some great insights into the Western genre, too. I might argue that there's a little more daylight between the "revisionist" and the "classical" moments of the genre than you allowed for (although even trying to delineate those things is hard - is "The Searchers" a preview of the one, or the dying tail end of the other? Or are those categories ultimately too complicated to do much good?) but I really agreed with a lot of your insights on its treatment of masculinity. And finally, I thought your handling of the idea of "toxic masculinity" was really deft. It's an idea that doesn't have much grip on me (maybe because I think I tend to come at gender stuff as being ultimately an effect, rather than a cause, or something like that?) but I learned a lot from your ideas about it.
I alluded to my working theory on the moral simplicity thing in my essay, which has a lot to do with the distance modern audiences feel toward the previous generations and their own moral failures. Younger viewers see the sins of their parents and want to know where they went wrong. A helpful answer might entail looking inward and trying to understand how even rightminded people can be susceptible to making (sometimes very large) mistakes, and so we in the 21st century might just need to be a little more vigilant about our own blind spots and weaknesses.
But ... admitting that you can understand how they got there can feel like a few steps away from seeing yourself in them--and admitting you may share their capacity for similar atrocities. Younger audiences don't want to imagine that a figure like Trump could ever swoop in and play into their own blind spots and compel them to similar wickedness. It's a lot easier to decide that the ancestors were just lacking in virtue, and that's not something we need to worry about today, which we can easily prove over and over with stories that have clearly defined good guys made in our own image. (For reference, this is coming from the keyboard of a younger millennial, one who's grateful for how his generation has advanced so many social causes, but who also wishes his peers would watch a black and white movie once in a while.) Again, working theory, but one that has admittedly been developed over time.
Every description I have heard of the revisionist western, and I have heard a few, can be summarized as some variation of "Old westerns were all about cowboys shooting their enemies across the frontier, and that was supposed to be okay because in the old days they thought that 'might makes right,' but more enlightened westerns have this new invention called 'moral complexity.'" These explanations are almost always paired with some image of John Wayne from The Searchers (probably because it's the first movie that comes up when you Google John Wayne) and it's a comparison that has always felt dissonant to me.
As a recent example, I started watching "Fallout" a few weeks back, and there's a point where one of the characters (he's supposed to be an actor in some kind of tv western) is questioning the director about the decisions his cowboy character is making about shooting the bad guy when he could just like put him in jail or something, and the in-universe director gives him some explanation about how this kind of thing is okay because the frontier will built on the back of his personality or something ... It just sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear about westerns from someone who's never really watched a western, which is where I come off thinking that the movies we'd call "revisionist" just aren't giving their predecessors their due.
But I always try to keep an open mind about these things. I may have just not come across a well-articulated outline of the revisionist western movement. If it were a topic you were to dive into, I'd definitely give it a good examination and consider some new ideas. (Oh dear, have I just accidentally given you a suggestion for a new post. Oops ...)
Great piece, man. So glad to have you back. I've lived in the US but I'm not from the US, so I don't think I've much to offer here, save perhaps an observation:
Mistrust of institutions/faith in individuals seems to be a runninng theme in US films, even the ones you mentioned. Institutions tend to be presented as imperfect at best and corrupt to the core at worst. But the message seems to be that there will always be an extraordinary individual whose purity of heart and indomitable spirit will lead them to generate permanent change for the benefit of all, in spite of the insurmountable odds stacked against them. I wonder if this doesn't help explain the Trump cult, the other side of the Mr. Smith coin: an outsider (but not really), with no ties to the establishment (but not really), fighting for the little guy (but not really), saying things like "I alone can fix it", and having it resonate...
I don't know. Just spitballing.
Great to hear from you - hope you've been well!
I think your analysis is spot on. To my way of thinking, there's a deep anti-institutional streak in American culture, running all the way through its politics and art, including cinema. I think the roots of it lie in the American myth of the rugged pioneer pushing ever westward, entirely responsible for his own livelihood. Research has long shown that this is indeed a myth - the vast majority of people involved in the westward expansion of the nation were dependent on other people, for it was communities, not individuals, that mainly ventured westward - but the idea/image of the strong (if atomised) individual got lodged really deeply in the American psyche. For me, the beneficial side of it (if that's the right term) is that it creates a deep suspicion of power; the downside is that it absolutely makes Americans vulnerable to charismatic individuals promising various forms of salvation.
What's interesting about Trump, I think, in this sense, is that a lot of these figures have tended to be religious - from John Edwards to Joseph Smith to the big name evangelical preachers of the '80s through today - and have confined their messages to the spiritual space, and of late the culture-war space. But Trump is one of the only (as far as I know) to be explicitly anti-democratic. This might be, again, why he feels so strange to so many people: radical religion (particularly in the evangelical framework) has long attended the culture, but anti-democratic attacks of this sort are much less familiar to us.
That's interesting. That placing of the individual above institutions also seems to paradoxically work as a defense of the status quo. If the right person is all it takes ti fix things, then the problem is not with the instituions but with the person or people in charge of them. No need for systemic change.
I've been very surprised by how quickly and without so much as a second's thought the Trump cultists have abandoned what have historically been some of their key principles: strict Constitutionality, tough on crime, no one is above the law, the military and law enforcement are sacrosanct... it's almost as if those things mean something very specific to them, and something completely different to everyone else.
Definitely. I also think the resistance to systemic change has a lot to do with American exceptionalism. The notion that America is the greatest country in the world - as opposed to just one country among many, which happens to be the place where I was born and which thus did a great deal to shape me, which is the reason why I'm partial to it - becomes an easy excuse for resistance to any kind of systemic change. And the individualistic bent of the society - the idea of America as "the home of the free" (individual) – is deeply intertwined with that notion.
As far as the right's capitulation to things that a few years ago would have seemed anathema to them, I too have been surprised. What I have no idea about is how much of that has to do with the psychology/specific experiences of the people who support the movement. I know there are a lot of arguments/studies out there about difference in the way the brains of liberals and conservatives work - how they process information, where they do that processing in their brains, etc. - but I also think that for the vast majority of people out there, regardless of left/right persuasion, political principles are secondary to desired results. Far too many people are willing to rationalize what "their" side does, regardless of what they were claiming their principles to be yesterday. Having said that, one of the real dangers, imho, of Trump and the MAGA faction is that they're willing to push outside the traditional boundaries of what's politically and culturally American, and have managed to leverage themselves into a place in which that's possible.
Exceedingly well put, man. It really is good to have you back.
And I agree 100%. I believe that most people cling to their political beliefs when it favors them to do so, and discard them when they are no longer convenient, which is why democracy is such a fragile thing. It needs constant love, care and attention if it is to even have a chance at succeeding. To most people, it is simply a means to an end. If that system doesn't work, bring on the next.
Rights in the abstract are no substitute for quality of life to most people, and while I don't blame them one iota for feeling that way, I do blame them for relishing the opportunity to hurt marginalized groups and communities on the off chance that it might possibly provide them with some tangential individual benefit at some point down the line. This is something I deal with on a daily basis in my professional life and, well... the only reason my own country hasn't wound up with a Trump/Bolsonaro/Bukele/Orban has been sheer dumb luck. But that is absolutely where things are trending right now....
Great to hear from you. Hope your Hollywood adventures are treating you well.
As usual, loved your insights. Even flawed heroes put themselves out there to build a world where its citizens are free to make their own happiness, and Trump certainly does not.
By way of total coincidence, I actually posted a piece on my own site this week that also looked at the myths of the American cowboy.
The essay is me responding to The Power of the Dog, a movie I wasn't particularly impressed with, tracing how I feel the film, and larger culture, casts the archetypal cowboy as just a MAGA fantasy when the classical western's relationship between masculinity, violence, and heroism was a lot more intricate than all that. I felt it had some overlapping points with some thoughts you shared here, and I'd be interested to know if you had any reaction to it.
https://filmsandfeelings19.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-power-of-dog-doesnt-want-to.html
Hey! Great to hear from you too!
I really liked the piece on "The Power of the Dog." I haven't seen it, so I don't have any ideas about it, but the way you laid it out doesn't surprise me. I wonder sometimes about the roots of this moral simplicity that seems to be snaking through so much of our art; I haven't thought much about what the origins of it might be, but it certainly seems prevalent.
I thought the piece had some great insights into the Western genre, too. I might argue that there's a little more daylight between the "revisionist" and the "classical" moments of the genre than you allowed for (although even trying to delineate those things is hard - is "The Searchers" a preview of the one, or the dying tail end of the other? Or are those categories ultimately too complicated to do much good?) but I really agreed with a lot of your insights on its treatment of masculinity. And finally, I thought your handling of the idea of "toxic masculinity" was really deft. It's an idea that doesn't have much grip on me (maybe because I think I tend to come at gender stuff as being ultimately an effect, rather than a cause, or something like that?) but I learned a lot from your ideas about it.
Great stuff.
I alluded to my working theory on the moral simplicity thing in my essay, which has a lot to do with the distance modern audiences feel toward the previous generations and their own moral failures. Younger viewers see the sins of their parents and want to know where they went wrong. A helpful answer might entail looking inward and trying to understand how even rightminded people can be susceptible to making (sometimes very large) mistakes, and so we in the 21st century might just need to be a little more vigilant about our own blind spots and weaknesses.
But ... admitting that you can understand how they got there can feel like a few steps away from seeing yourself in them--and admitting you may share their capacity for similar atrocities. Younger audiences don't want to imagine that a figure like Trump could ever swoop in and play into their own blind spots and compel them to similar wickedness. It's a lot easier to decide that the ancestors were just lacking in virtue, and that's not something we need to worry about today, which we can easily prove over and over with stories that have clearly defined good guys made in our own image. (For reference, this is coming from the keyboard of a younger millennial, one who's grateful for how his generation has advanced so many social causes, but who also wishes his peers would watch a black and white movie once in a while.) Again, working theory, but one that has admittedly been developed over time.
Every description I have heard of the revisionist western, and I have heard a few, can be summarized as some variation of "Old westerns were all about cowboys shooting their enemies across the frontier, and that was supposed to be okay because in the old days they thought that 'might makes right,' but more enlightened westerns have this new invention called 'moral complexity.'" These explanations are almost always paired with some image of John Wayne from The Searchers (probably because it's the first movie that comes up when you Google John Wayne) and it's a comparison that has always felt dissonant to me.
As a recent example, I started watching "Fallout" a few weeks back, and there's a point where one of the characters (he's supposed to be an actor in some kind of tv western) is questioning the director about the decisions his cowboy character is making about shooting the bad guy when he could just like put him in jail or something, and the in-universe director gives him some explanation about how this kind of thing is okay because the frontier will built on the back of his personality or something ... It just sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear about westerns from someone who's never really watched a western, which is where I come off thinking that the movies we'd call "revisionist" just aren't giving their predecessors their due.
But I always try to keep an open mind about these things. I may have just not come across a well-articulated outline of the revisionist western movement. If it were a topic you were to dive into, I'd definitely give it a good examination and consider some new ideas. (Oh dear, have I just accidentally given you a suggestion for a new post. Oops ...)
Thank you for using your superior intellect, insights and talents for the benefit of so many!
I'm delighted that you found it worth reading!
So glad you are back!
As always, a thoughtful and informed essay.
So glad you enjoyed it!