I finally saw Andrew Dominik’s much praised film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). This top-notch demonstration of filmmaking, along with two others that also came out in 2007, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, all exhibit a radical shift in the employment of the most American genre of all time, the western.
The western is a story so closely tied into American history that it creates such convoluted lines as to force the critic, and the historian, to ask themselves,” which came first? The western or the ‘American dream’?” Of course, it was not until long after the west had been won that the western started to reign as a film genre, but at that point the story had already been told a million times in the form of pulp fiction novels and commercial landscape painting.
The transparent traits of westerns, such as the anti-hero, glorification and eventual conquest of the wilderness, and strict moral code as supreme law, make this genre immediately identifiable. Consider John Ford’s Stagecoach and its desolate plains subjugated to the powers from the east, or Ford’s My Darling Clementine where the morality of revenge is weight against the morality of corrupt business practices. Revenge wins out. The “American dream” flies its flag high and proud throughout stories such as these.
The “American dream”, an elusive and capitally annoying term, means something different to everyone. No one would dispute that it totes the virtues of the industrial age Material prosperity is democracy! In the western this materialism is translated into expansionism, and a moral code that bends under materialism. The western would tell us that every man (and woman?) has the right to seek happiness though fulfilling his need for stuff.
The three films of 2007, amongst the best of the year, all display these attributes of the classic western. What is unique about them though is that they turn that morality on its head and question defining it by the terms of the “American dream” as specified by the industrial age. Instead, the sentiments of Americans today seep out as readily as blood in these films.
In the The Assassination of Jesse James the titular character lives his life by his own lawless moral code and in old age finds himself depressed and terrified. His life is ended in the most cowardly of fashions by his biggest fan who hates him for not living up to his name. In this allegory James is the American dream, a broken man who fails to attain fulfillment though wealth. One moral code against another (or complete lack there of as seen with the character Anton Chigurh) defines the western aspects of No Country. The entire plot is based around the pursuit of a bag of money in which miles and miles of land are covered, and survived, by the cowboys who conquer it. Lastly, in There Will Be Blood Daniel Plainview finds no solace in the materialism of the avaricious oil industry. Neither does his parallel and archenemy, Eli, in his capitalistic pursuits of religion.
Clearly, the western is a genre that will never die no matter how over done it becomes. To forgo the traditional perception of the American dream as seen in classic westerns is to recreate the genre and breathe life back into it. It is in the just portrayal of society that master story telling resides. In these films that society is one demoralized by materialism, corrupt government, and war.