Unforgiven, Open Range and the Dusty Trail to Redemption

by Christopher Barr

 

"It's a helluva thing, killin' a man. Take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have."

 

What is it about the Wild West that we love so much?  It could be that it’s the last pre-industrialized era in American history.  Which may make it the most relatable; Unforgiven (1992) is my favorite film of this genre.  Tombstone is up there as one of my favorites as well.  But Clint Eastwood’s now classic is a film about redemption and then retribution, it’s about a man that can’t outrun his past.

Open Range (2003) is a film by Kevin Costner that is my opinion is underrated.  This film is the only western since Unforgiven that could stand safely beside it.  Both films explore age old historical notions of man vs. nature, but both these films aside from their place in time are about man vs. himself.

That’s the real question; no matter what time you are in, what is it to be yourself?  How does one live with not only what they did but if placed, what they will do?  These films are about a man within a man, often a stranger, a shadow that surfaces when survival is all that lies between them and, oddly enough living with their memories of what that stranger inside executed.  Because of the prevalence of surface thought, people generally don’t consider what’s inside a person screaming to get out.  What is the struggle people go through to just live as themselves?  Plato said “Be kind for everyone is fighting a battle”, that is what people fight.  Conflicts are often internalized ones that become external, shifting the blame from oneself to an external force to relieve one’s own guilt.

William Munny was an old pig farmer with a couple of kids and a wife that passed away a few years prior.  He was brought into an assassination plot to avenge the mutilation of a prostitute.  Reluctantly he agrees and then enlists his old partner Ned to join in.  This film explores a journey into the darkness but yet a redux, being the man outlived the calamity only to be drawn back in.  The great thing about this film and Open Range is they are after thoughts of men that lived villainous lives and sought redemption.

Eastwood’s film is colored and scored like the wanted paper the younger William Munny’s bounty was printed on.  The film was brown and windy and dusty.  Everything about this film wasn’t modern and that’s where its poetry flourished.  The film was about a man that was drunk through most of the heinous crimes but met a woman that helped him change his ways.  Only after her death he’s brought back into this world of gun fighting and murder. 

"You better bury Ned right; and don't go cuttin' up... nor otherwise harm no whores, or I'll come back and kill every one of you sons-a-bitches."

What I love about Unforgiven, when pressed after Ned’s murder, was William Munny showing the devil, the shadow, he worked so hard to keep at bay, at the end of the film, killing Little Bill and anyone else involved.  The film was about a man that couldn’t escape his past, and I think that’s what philosophy is about.  It’s about recognizing where you come from and what you can change and what you cannot change.  In William Munny’s case he tried but who he was is who he became.  That’s the real tragedy of the film.  Not all the shooting and killing but the reality of who you are, naked, with all the scares and blood to follow.

Little Bill was a killer who counted on his killer instinct because in his case he enjoyed the power it brought.  He received fame and fortune for being good at killing people.  An author came to him and offered to write a book about his infamous kills, sort of glamorizing murder.  Bill got so use to it that he didn’t even see it as a bad thing. 

Which is the golden nugget of the film, what is it to be bad?  What is it to be regretful for past acts of violence?  Can a person be responsible for a horrible crime and later actually learn their lesson?  Where does redemption lie?

Open Range was about a man that simply didn’t want to get involved anymore.  So moving cattle from place to place seemed to be the lesser of two evils.  But when violence caught up to Kevin Costner’s character Charley Waite, he acted.  He is a man with a violent past but like in the case of William Munny, that violence in the world, crossed their respective paths.  Then shootouts ensued, guns a blazing and bad guys dying with both men leaving with their lives.

“You may not know this but….. there’s things that gnaw at a man worse than dyin.”

 

What I love about westerns is they erase all the modern bullshit and look at a man in his most naked form.  People shroud themselves in their things and their careers these days, complicating a simple way of looking at the world.  We are responsible for our actions and redemption doesn’t lie in God or the bible but in ourselves.  As hard as it is to except, we are responsible for all the other versions of ourselves that live within us.  Those immature and misguided times in our past that at the time we acted as we thought we should, for our own benefit.  Therein lies the redemption, you are responsible for your actions but you are more responsible for realization.  I think people are born good and it’s the world and the influence surrounding it, that changes people and it often takes many years of living, before a person realizes they must make a change within themselves, some don’t ever.

William Munny left us in Unforgiven as a villain, a righteous one, but never the less, a bad man.  Charlie Waite of Open Range left us as a man with hope, a man that doesn’t have to be the sum of all his parts, but a man with the right woman can hang up his guns and live a fulfilling life and build a family.  Hopefully, Charlie Waite isn’t a William Munny in the making only to later be Unforgiven.

“Told you I was wantin’ out of the cattle business.  Funny thing…there’s a saloon right back there just had its owner die.  Hopin’ you’d be my partner.”

 

Gravity and the Journey to Birth

by Christopher Barr

Gravity was a film about resilience.  It was a film about living without all the hope and dreams that often fuel what we think it means to be alive.  This film sheds all the baggage and in some cases the language that we all feel defines and comforts our version of reality.

In spite of its technological complexity within the film, the film took the Ockham’s razor approach of a simple way is the best way.  Point A to point B to Point C, it also took that ‘it isn’t all about me approach’.  It was atavistic in its woman vs. nature point of view.  And what a point of view it was.

The Ryan Reynolds film Buried took a naturalistic approach that was mature and controlled.  Like Gravity, that film didn’t let the audience off the hook with flashbacks.  These films both kept you in the environment they started from and forced their respective audiences to stay there with them. 

Gravity was mesmerizing with its background Earth shots and its technology.  The footage of the ships and the ISS, International Space Station and the 360 camera angles put you as an audience member into that world like no other.  The only other film that comes to mind for me was Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys where the geriatric crew of that space shuttle had to stop a huge Russian satellite from reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.   I would also add Ron Howard’s best film to date, Apollo 13 for its realistic approach while in space.

Gravity went beyond any film on space travel when regarding realism.  What is it like to be alone, with your thoughts, with your memories, with your fears?  This film explored those philosophical questions throughout, where you have to take ownership of your actions, taking responsibility for your existence without a fanatical miracle story to follow.

Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours was a film about a young man that is caught between a rock and a hard place and can’t escape.  His right arm is wedged when a boulder catches the lead character in a cavern.  He eventually severs his arm and frees himself.  This like Gravity was a film about perseverance and will.

Ang Lee’s Life of Pi was a film about a young man stranded in the middle of the ocean after a huge ship he was on sunk, killing everyone aboard including his family.  This film was also about perseverance and will power, man vs. nature.

My favorite thing about Gravity was the silence, it was Zen like.  She was alone and it was up to her, in spite of seemingly incalculable odds, to use her brain and figure out a way to solve a problem and this was all after she accepted death, looking it right in the face.  That story never gets old because every human being on this planet can relate to it.  Most of us live our whole lives without ever really seeing what we are capable of in the face of death.  Or for that matter, achieving something we start out believing is beyond our reach. 

 

Most of us point in fact are underachievers, myself included.  There are reasons for this, whether it’s a childhood lesson that you will amount to nothing, no matter how hard you try or for some reason you think you want something but in actuality you don’t.  I think a lot of it comes down to laziness and procrastination, ‘I’ll deal with it tomorrow’.  Tomorrow is that fantasy land where everything desired gets done and today is an infected land filled with weight and reality.  

In Sandra Bullock’s case in the film, she was using space as a way of escape.  A woman fixated on her detailed work away from the world, is able to forget about the biggest tragedy of her life, the loss of her daughter, who died in an accident.  As horrible a loss that is, that doesn’t end Bullock’s life, her life forges on.  What we do with a life drenched in tragedy is deal with it and not hide from it.  We dig deep within ourselves and live again and that’s what the heart of this film is about. 

A rebirth.

Parkland, JFK and Propagandizing the Murder of a President

by Christopher Barr

"What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by an American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living...not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women; not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time."    - JFK

Parkland is about the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas on November.22, 1963.  It follows various people around the chaotic events that came after the murder, focusing on Parkland hospital in Dallas where the president was rushed to after being shot in the head, also the events that surrounded Lee Harvey Oswald when he was rushed to Parkland after being shot by Jack Ruby.

The film follows the events, leading up to and after, Abraham Zapruder shooting his infamous film of the event itself.  Also events at the Dallas FBI field office where it was determined that Oswald was in their office a mere 10 days prior but what was mistakenly deemed not a threat. 

It’s hard to believe that this film isn’t just a propaganda film to help combat the fallout of the 50^th anniversary of the assassination.  Questions will be asked as well as TV specials on the event will likely air, leading up to the anniversary.  This film doesn’t answer anything new and distorts the events themselves; also it relies on the tall glass of Americana bullshit that the government shills out to the people regularly.  Like the sappiness of how better they all are compared to the rest of the world.  The film is a color by numbers of the Warren Commission Report covered up view of the events of the assassination.

Religion played a big part in the movie, everyone always blessing each other of blessing god or themselves.  Fake tender moments of sorrow and disbelief ran throughout the film.  All the characters were one dimensional with the exception of Robert Oswald, Lee’s brother.  Speaking of Lee, there was a scene in the film after Oswald was captured and taken into custody that he was able to speak to his brother Robert.  A catatonic looking Oswald walked in the room mumbling cryptic slurs at his brother with a very calm disposition.  If history serves, Oswald was a wreck when he was taken into custody as any man would who was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.  In this film they portrayed him as a caught man that was going to get what was coming to him.  

The film reminded me yet again of how afraid the American people are of their wrathful government, because this film played it safe, Hallmark-card style.  The evidence of a second shooter is overwhelming in this case; it makes you wonder if quantum mechanics and applied physics aren’t really taught is schools so the confused public can’t work out the logic of the events themselves, but is rather subject to the experts on "Fox News" and "CNN" to get their evidence.

21 years ago Oliver Stone’s JFK film told the story of the events after the assassination.  The difference here is Stone’s film clearly did its research and cared, two essential components that horribly lacked in Parkland. Stone’s film felt pissed off at the cover story, it felt frustrated at the growing propaganda campaign to manipulate the public into thinking that Oswald was the killer and acted alone.  Oswald apparently shot Kennedy from the six floor of the Texas Book Depository because of his “hatred of American society” and his “perpetual discontentment” and was acting “without regard to consequences”.

Like September 11^th, 2001, the facts of the JFK assassination is so convoluted that the truth becomes so buried that the worlds most renowned Paleo-Prospector wouldn’t be able to excavate it properly, and that’s the point I think.  All the conspiracy theories are an injustice in themselves, all wanting to surface the truth but collectively drowning that possibility.  Truth becomes unattainable in this web of theory, what one thinks happened based on whatever evidence they uncover.  Some say the secret service limo driver did it by accident when he heard a car backfire and panicked.  The truth does exist but we have robbed our ability to ascertain it because of our subjective views on objectivity.  We add, we add emotion and hatred and view points to an event that requires none to understand it.  9/11 is swamped in conspiracy theory to such an extent that those that really orchestrated it can sit back and say, ‘good luck figuring it out’. 

By this notion of only seeing what we want to see, destroys the investigation at the outset, contaminating it with ideology and conjecture.  The cover story stands, period.  Lee Harvey Oswald shot he 35^th president of the United States of America from the six floor of the Texas Book Depository building, shooting into the president’s motorcade, specifically the open-top limo hitting Kennedy and governor John Connally before delivering a fatal shot to Kennedy’s head all within a 4.5 to 7 second spurt.  Oswald fled the scene among the chaos and was caught an hour later inside a movie theatre after shooting to death Dallas police officer D. Tippit.  He was taken into custody and later killed by one Jack Ruby. 

19 hijackers with box cutters commandeered four planes on 9/11 to attack America and its freedom.  It doesn’t matter that the phone system was shut down in Dallas and Washington during the JFK assassination, to control the flow of information, which allowed the government to program their cover story into the minds of their ignorant public, or that Vice President Dick Cheney ordered NORAD to shut down during the actual attacks on New York City and Washington on 9/11.  Just because we know that Oswald, the lone gunman, and the 19 highjackers wouldn’t have the connections to exact such things doesn’t make them any less guilty, they’re guilty because the government and their multimedia news story-tellers say so.

You can bet that crazy Bill O’Reilly on the O’Reilly Factor will be dispelling all conspiracy theorist as nut jobs come November when his program along with Fox news discusses the assassination’s 50^th year anniversary.  The point is they have to, they have to promote their history at all cost, because that history, as distorted at it is, is the fantasy fabric that binds what’s left of that country together.  That’s all that’s left, we’re right and you’re wrong childhood playground politics, and that’s where Parkland falls in.  To hell with the conspiracy, let’s just tug on the emotional aspects of the nostalgia, trampling over the man’s memory as they go.

Traversing the fantasy doesn’t seem to be a possibility with these odds; the bubble seems to appear well intact.  What hope is there in a country when sticking your head in the sand isn’t only better for you but is also patriotic, and what’s best for a country who is desperately hanging on by a thread?  For many countries in the world we would chalk this up as growing pains, America is a young teenager and needs time to mature.  That’s fine but America has a mass military armada that could level the earth as we know it.  On a smaller scale, that’s like putting guns in the hands of ignorant, iron-pumping, knuckle-draggers and call them police as they shoot down an unarmed women in her car, with her child in the backseat, while panicking because she has guns pointing at her and her child from every direction.  Magnify that by a million and we see an army of brainwashed men with machine guns and politicians with their fingers on the nuclear triggers.  America has become the bully that wants your lunch money and with that sensibility we must ask ourselves; should we be worried?  You’re goddamn right we should be worried.