The Coen Brothers and the Swarthy Hordes
Comments on The Gal Who Got Rattled, in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
directed by the
Joel and Ethan Coen, 2018
In
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix,
2018), the Coen Brothers have produced a collection of six short stories that pay
homage to the genre of classic Western fiction that entertained young boys in
the early 20th century and later inspired the Hollywood Western in mid-century.
In one story, The Gal Who Got Rattled
(based on a story published in 1901), there seems to be a deliberate modern
interpretation of the paradigm of “the wagon train versus the swarthy hordes.” It
is a theme analyzed by Michael Parenti which he claims is a grotesque reversal
of the historical roles of usurper and usurped. I found it curious and outrageous
that the Coen Brothers used their prestigious talents to rehash a genre that we
should have been glad to see buried in the past. Before further discussion, let’s
go over the first few minutes of Michael Parenti’s lecture:
Michael Parenti: Rambo and the Swarthy Hordes (1989) Introduction (12 minutes) Full lecture (54 minutes)
Entertainment media
as a propaganda vehicle for American ruling class interests and attitudes
Michael
Parenti is an author and political analyst. Among his books are The Sword and the Dollar, Inventing Reality, History As Mystery, and his latest The Terrorism Trap. This talk was given in 1989 in North Hollywood,
California during the administration of George Bush the First, an
administration consisting of most of the same players that occupy positions in
the present Bush administration. (Introduction
to the lecture written in 2002)
__________
Michael Parenti:
I
wanted today to give attention to the other side of the media—not the news
media but the entertainment media because the entertainment media consumes a
much larger share of the viewing time of most Americans than do the news
programs. And I thought I would call this book something like The Hidden Political Images of the
Entertainment Media, and then as I thought about it, I said, “Well, what’s
so hidden about it?” It’s rather blatant. And what I looked at are Hollywood
films—that’s what I’m studying—Hollywood films and TV dramas, TV mini-series,
teleplays and the like. What I find is a real abundance of images and
ideologies, ones that are essentially supportive of imperialism,
anti-communism, capitalism, racism, sexism, militarism, authoritarian violence,
vigilantism, and anti-working-class attitudes. More specifically, I found these
kinds of themes:
(1)
Individual heroics predominate over collective action. There’s almost no
collective action. There’s almost no story or drama where people organize together
and do something for themselves. There are one or two exceptions. When they do
and there is collective action, they are usually led by some hero who has to
spur them on and really do the whole thing himself.
(2)
Free enterprise is the best economic system in the world. That’s a message
which is not necessarily telegraphed so much as it is presumed. Certainly
there’s nothing positive ever uttered about alternative systems in the
entertainment media.
(3)
Private monetary gain is a central and worthy objective of life, although those
who are too wickedly greedy—the Dynasty guys and Dallas fellows—they can meet
with disapproval. Sometimes business characters are insensitive to other
people’s needs because they’re so busy with their business activities, but when
properly apprised of the problems and such, they are suddenly capable of
legendary acts of generosity which I’ve never seen in real life, but I see in
television dramas. “The kid needs the house? Give it to him.” “Give the factory
to Joe. He’s a good guy.” And that sort of thing.
(4)
Workers are beer guzzling regular Joe’s. I mean they’re good-natured and all
that, but really not very bright, incapable… they’re almost always incapable of
leadership and of acting as agents of their own lives. One wonders really where
labor unions came from class bigotry is a very common form of bigotry, and it
remains totally unchallenged, unlike gender bigotry or race bigotry which at
least is challenged today. The practices and forms of class bigotry go on in
abundance in the media and remain unchallenged.
(5)
Affluent professionals in almost all programs are considered much more
interesting than blue-collar or ordinary service workers. There are many more
of them as principal characters.
(6)
Women and ethnic minorities are really not as capable, effective or interesting
as white males.
(7)
In cop shows, the police and everyone else should be given a free a hand in
combating the large criminal element in America using generous applications of
force and violence without too much attention to constitutional rights.
(8)
The ills of society are caused by individual malefactors, and not by anything
in the socio-economic system.
(9)
US military force is directed only toward laudable goals, or more often the
goals are not even stated… I mean why are people doing all this fighting and
killing? It’s a question that remains largely unstated.
(10)
Western industrial and military might, especially the US’s, has been a
civilizing force for the benefit of backward peoples throughout the third
world.
(11)
The United States and the entire Western world have long been threatened from
abroad by foreign aggressors such as the Russians, communists, terrorists, Arab
terrorists, and generally the swarthy hordes of less developed peoples.
(12)
… the paradigm of the wagon train versus the swarthy hordes [was] first
enunciated very well in a marvelous article by Tom Engelhardt in The Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists. It could be happening in the American Wild West. It could
be in the Amazon jungle, the North African desert, the Sudan, the Transvaal,
the South Pacific jungles or Indochina. The scene is generally the same.
There’s a fort, or an encampment, or a wagon train, and inside that encampment
are the human beings. They are white. They’re human. They’re warm. They’re
attractive. They talk and they’re nice. Outside come the swarthy hordes, the
savages. They can be Indians. They could be Bushmen. They can be Arabs on
camels and horses, or whatever else, and they are these sub-humans. And they
are attacking the human beings and the wagons form their circle, and the human
beings know what to do. They level their guns and they begin to knock off,
shoot and kill these screaming savages who attack them.
Why
do the swarthy hordes attack the white people? You don’t know, and they never
tell you. Is it to protect their lands? Is it to protect their herds? Is it to
protect their villages, and their towns, and their families, and their
children? No, it’s just because they like to do that. That’s their thing. They
like to attack, and so they have to be killed. And by the way, it’s not even
bravery that they manifest as they charge in great numbers and get cut down in
horrible numbers.
This
is not even bravery, although similar acts by whites would be portrayed as
heroic. This itself is portrayed as a manifestation of the swarthy hordes,
their fanatic, crazed way of wanting to bloodlust.
Now
the trouble with this paradigm is that it turns the history of the last 400
years on its head. It reverses the roles of usurper and usurped. It reverses
the roles of victim and victimizer. It reverses the roles of those who were
massacred and those who are doing the massacring. It was the European and North
American civilizers (so-called) who went in there and destroyed the villages,
and destroyed their industries, and destroyed their townships.
Read
Engels on North Africa—what happened to the Arabs and Berbers. He goes in and
describes the beautiful towns with their fine hard stone and plaster buildings,
and their woolen industries, and their mining industries, and their arts and
crafts and all that, and then read the description of the French troops coming
in and systematically destroying it and killing every man, woman and child.
Read about how the Germans went into South Africa and killed the Herero tribe.
80,000 people they killed—60,000 of them, and the other 20,000 they used as
slave labor in their mines.
Read
Mark Twain’s angry raging comments about King Leopold of Belgium, calling him a
Mad Dog for what he did to the innocent, unoffending people of the Congo,
taking them and enslaving them—a million of them a year dying in the mines in
the Congo. That’s what the history is about. That’s what John Wayne is about.
And what these films do is they reverse that history, standing it on its head.
They do what Joseph Goebbels said: they give you a big lie, and they embellish
it, and they make you root for the guys in the wagon train.
Now
once you kill, and once you plunder like that, once you go in to take another
people’s land, and steal their labor, and enslave their labor and take their
resources, and pre-empt and take over their markets, once you do that kind of
act—and it wasn’t the ordinary people of Europe and North America that did
it—it was the ruling interest that did it, and they used our taxes, our money,
and our sons to go fight. But once you do that, you have to do two other
things, ideologically and psychologically. One thing is you have to deny the
humanity of your victims. They are sub-humans and they are moral inferiors. As
John Wayne said in one of his horse operas in 1953, “There’s humans and then
there’s Comanches.” A very clear message. He couldn’t have said it better.
“There’s humans and then there’s Comanches.” You’re not killing human beings.
You’re killing these wild animals. By the way, you get the same quotes from
Winston Churchill about the Afghanis. You can get the same quotes from George
Washington about American Indians, and you can get them from any number of
imperialists.
The
second thing you do is you must ascribe all your crimes to them. You deny your
own inhumanity, and you accuse your victims of doing to you what you have been
doing to them all along.
(end of excerpt, see the full lecture on YouTube)
__________
I
chose to frame this short review with Michael Parenti’s thirty-year-old lecture
because sadly little has changed in popular entertainment, even that of the
hip, progressive and intelligent directors whom we might assume are too sophisticated
to deal in the old tropes and stereotypes of Hollywood in the
John Wayne era. The Coen Brothers are certainly among the most talented and
knowledgeable directors ever to come out of Hollywood. I can’t deny that I have
enjoyed their films. However, because of their great gifts for storytelling,
comedy and blending of genres, critics have heaped on the praise but seldom
examined the propaganda messages inherent in their stories. If we consider them
briefly, though, what do we see?
In
the first lines of their first film, Blood
Simple (1984), voice over narration of a character speaking from beyond the
grave says:
The world is full of complainers. But the
fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. Now, I don't care if you’re the pope
of Rome, president of the United States or Man of the Year. Something can
always go wrong. And go ahead, you know—complain. Tell your problems to your
neighbor. Ask for help. And watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped
out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That's the theory, anyway. But
what I know about is Texas. And down here, you're on your own.
It
is odd that the Coen Brothers’ catalog begins with this reference to communism
then portrays an utterly cynical view of life within American capitalism. One
could keep this brief monologue in mind while viewing every film that followed
in their career. Primarily, they are all set in the United States and they all
depict alienated, desperate and damaged people struggling to make it in a
society where “you’re on your own.” The excessive violence in many of the films
is too well known to require further discussion.
The Big Lebowski (1997) was set in
the end of the Cold War and the approaching victory in the Gulf War—the end of
an era in which “the bums lost,” as the wealthy Lebowski tells his “loser”
doppelganger. The film is a recognized classic, a comic masterpiece, and the
Dude (Jeff Bridges) has become a revered icon of 20th century American culture.
He is celebrated, yet few have reflected on what a depressing message the film
conveys. It tells us that those who resisted American militarism gave up the
fight and drifted into drugs and fetish hobbies like bowling, and succumbed
to greedy schemes such as we see in the film—fighting to retrieve a stolen
possession or scamming to get a reward for recovering ransom money. The
protagonist is a former high-ranking peace activist, one of the drafters of the
Port Huron statement, but now he is just a bum, and a rather mentally
challenged one. He’s stoned and drunk all the time, and his clumsiness is the
butt of most of the jokes. Faced with the loss of a mere carpet, he tosses his
pacifism aside and decides to “go to war” to get it back, urged on by his war
veteran pal and the tough talk of President Bush the First emanating from every
television. The president’s words just flow thoughtlessly out of the Dude’s
mouth as he demands justice for his ruined carpet: “This aggression will not
stand, man.” This is the message of the film: Even those who cared most deeply
about building a better society were just a bunch of hippies and dope heads. All
was lost, and resistance was futile as America “won” the Cold War and geared up
for the invasion of Iraq. It is a reiteration of the Archie Bunker stereotype,
that “workers are beer guzzling [or dope smoking] regular Joe’s, good-natured
and all that, but really not very bright, incapable,” as Parenti put it.
The
same class bigotry appeared almost twenty years later in Hail, Caesar (2016), with a group of communist writers portrayed as
greedy kidnappers and other assorted Hollywood stars shown as too stupid to act
“as agents of their own lives.” The movie studio would not function without the
leadership of its one serious man, the head of “physical production,” who
spends his days and nights fixing and covering up the assorted scandals that
his hapless charges create.
Perhaps
the most egregious example of the Coen Brothers’ drift into ruling class
propagandizing comes from their most recent work, the
collection of short stories entitled The
Ballad of Buster Scruggs, now playing on Netflix. The story within called The Gal Who Got Rattled features a wagon
train on its way to Oregon. The build-up in the first forty-two minutes of the
story shows a sweet, innocent courtship between a couple who meet during the
journey and decide to homestead together once they reach their destination. This
set-up serves to show us who the human beings are, and it is very well done. Then
they are contrasted with the group of nineteen “savages” who appear at the
crest of a hill and attack the human beings during the last seven minutes of
the story. When the savages appear, the young fiancée has wandered away from
the wagon train during a rest stop. The manager of the wagon train senses danger
and rides off to look for her. Her betrothed, a loyal employee of the manager,
remains behind, unaware of the situation. The manager finds the young maiden,
but it is too late. The savages have appeared in the distance. It is impossible
to flee on horseback because their horses will trip in the patch of prairie-dog
holes they are in, so they must “stand their ground,” as they say in American
parlance. It is notable that the writers take a somewhat politically correct
course by not mentioning any particular Native American tribe. They enemy is
referred to as “savages” and “Indians” only—no specific mention of Comanches in
the modern version.
The
manager warns the young lady about the horrible situation they have to face:
They don’t know how to fight. If they was
to come front and back, I couldn’t handle them, but they rush in a bunch like
damn fools. Take this, miss. It got two bullets in it. It ain’t for shooting
Indians. If I see we’re licked, I’m going to shoot you then shoot myself, so
that’s OK. But if you see that I’m done for, well, you’re going to have to do
it for yourself. You put it right there [points to her forehead] so you can’t
miss. If they catch you, it won’t be so good. After they take off every stitch
of your clothes and have their way with you, they’ll stretch you out with a
rawhide and drive a stake through the middle of your body into the ground, and
then they’ll do some other things. And we can’t have that.
 |
| Battle scene from The Gal Who Got Rattled, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs |
Here
we have all that Parenti described, freshly re-issued in the year 2018. It’s a
wonder that the Coen Brothers could dare to ask Native American actors to
participate in this travesty. What sort of awkward discussions did they have with
them while filming this scene? It may be true that brutal raids like this occurred
in the late 19th century, but the story tells us nothing about how the Native Indians’
cultures had been destroyed to such an extent that the surviving men roamed the
prairie committing such desperate acts of retribution, like modern day suicide
bombers in the Middle East. As with all the post-911 stories about terrorism,
there is no discussion of root causes and the preceding decades of political
destabilization. They just attack with wild abandon. They are “fools” and “they
don’t know how to fight.” That’s just what they do.
With
all of their superb talents, why couldn’t the Coen Brothers write a story about
the complex history of the West, one that would humanize Native Americans, tell
the story from their point of view, and teach something realistic about
American history? It’s not like it’s never been done before. Ten years ago, HBO’s
Deadwood portrayed how treaties with
the Sioux were broken by the US government as soon as gold was discovered in
the Black Hills. In 1970, Arthur Penn turned the imperialist Western genre on
its head with Little Big Man. Instead,
the Coen Brothers find it more worthwhile to apply their considerable talents to
a nostalgic indulgence in the tropes of Hollywood history, recycling tales of
the West in ways that were done seventy years ago. And they might even being doing
this with a sense of self-conscious irony, perhaps with some cynical awareness
that contemporary audiences are ripe to fall for this retrospective on the classic
Western. If so, such cynicism was astute. The critics are lapping it up. The
National Board of Review named The
Ballad of Buster Scruggs as one of their top ten best films of 2018, and
it’s a rumored favorite for Oscar season. Such popularity speaks volumes about
the political mood of these times in which the so-called left chastises the disdained
occupant of the White House for being too hesitant to continue the recent
history of destroying Middle Eastern countries. I wrote above that it is
outrageous, but the revival of the besieged-wagon-train motif shouldn’t be a surprise.
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