Smeared All Over With Blood
The Misfits (1961), Masculine Independence, and the Death of the Old West
“I come out here four years ago,” Miller continued, “the same year McDonald did. My God! You should have seen this country then. In the spring, you could look out from here and see the whole land black with buffalo, solid as grass, for miles. There was only a few of us then, and it was nothing for one party to get a thousand, fifteen hundred head in a couple of weeks hunting. Spring hides, too, pretty good fur. Now it’s hunted out. They travel in smaller herds, and a man’s lucky to get two or three hundred head a trip. Another year or two, there won’t be any hunting left in Kansas.”
Andrews took another sip of whisky. “What will you do then?”
Miller shrugged. “I’ll go back to trapping, or I’ll do some mining, or I’ll hunt something else.” He frowned at his glass. “Or I’ll hunt buffalo. There are still places they can be found, if you know where to look.”
—Butcher’s Crossing (1960), John Williams
Roger Sterling: It’s a terrible tragedy, but that woman’s a stranger. Roosevelt…I hated him, but I felt like I knew him.
Joan Holloway: A lot of people felt like they knew her. You should be sensitive to that.
—Mad Men, Season 2 Episode 9 (2008), “Six Month Leave”
The car is severely battered, but the mechanic who proposes to buy it is confused. It seems brand-new; its mileage is miniscule, and the engine looks pristine. The car owner’s friend explains: “It’s the darn men in this town. They keep running into her just to start a conversation.” As well they might, we think, when we meet the owner, Roslyn Taber, played by Marilyn Monroe in her completed film appearance before her death at the age of thirty-six. It was never a challenge to make Monroe look luminous, but director John Huston leaves nothing to chance, filming her closeups in an exaggerated soft-focus that makes her look almost like a dream. The damaged car, we learn, was a present from Roslyn’s husband on the occasion of their divorce, which she is in Reno to finalize. It also functions as a metaphor, none too subtle, for the way Roslyn moves through the world: battered by the men who desire her, every interaction a collision. The car is new, and it’s hardly been anywhere, but the thoughtless lusts of men have already taken their toll. She’s finished with it now. It will sell for whatever it’s worth.
This opening scene is the setup for a drama of gender relations, and Huston’s The Misfits (1961) is a heartbreaking one, deeply inflected by the knowledge of Monroe’s tragic death by suicide less than eighteen months after its release. It was modestly received by critics, some of whom singled out Monroe for criticism; it’s hard now to reconstruct their thinking, since Monroe gives a performance of staggering openness and vulnerability, an act of onscreen self-exposure like few in the history of film. Perhaps, though, contemporary critics found it hard to reconcile the film’s crushing exploration of Marilyn and the men who use her with its genre elements: because The Misfits is also a Western, and a great one, which looks pitilessly at a set of myths foundational to American film, and indeed to America itself. The West is dying in The Misfits, or perhaps it has already died, its promises foreclosed by its final absorption into the great machine of industrial capitalism. The men who haunt its ruins feel entitled, as much as anything, to a certain image of themselves; they came out here to become something, to feel like men of a certain size, but the feeding frenzy that might once have sustained them has drawn down into a battle for scraps. They’ll have to feed on something else, now.
Free discussion of plot details from the film will follow this point.
All The Husbands And All The Wives
The film’s Reno setting helps situate its narrative in a world where love and marriage seem suddenly to have become fraught with instability. Before the widespread adoption of no-fault divorce, Reno was synonymous with divorce in the American imagination; a stay there of a few weeks was enough to establish residency and take advantage of the city’s comparatively lenient divorce laws. We meet Roslyn at the end of this residency period, along with her friend and landlord, Isabelle (played with great world-weary humor by Thelma Ritter), who makes a living renting out rooms to would-be divorcees and acting as a witness to the official proceedings. The mechanic, Guido, played by Eli Wallach, is smitten with Roslyn immediately, and soon introduces her to Clark Gable’s Gay, an aging cowboy first seen politely dismissing his latest sexual conquest. Isabelle likes both men, but sees them straightaway for the danger to Roslyn that they are: she refers to Guido derisively as a “Reno man,” stereotypically on the prowl for the newly-unattached, and in Gay she sees the very image of a cowboy, dashing, dissolute, fundamentally untrustworthy. These are the kinds of people Reno thrusts together, drawn to this city on the edge of the desert by its alluring—and frightening—promises of freedom.
Every one of these characters, we soon learn, has been married before. Roslyn and Isabelle are divorced, as is Gay, while Guido is a widower. With the exception of Isabelle, whose divorce seems amicable, the ends of these marriages are presented as quietly defining tragedies. Guido’s wife was killed by a bad miscarriage, a loss which drove him from the pleasant country home they were building together. Roslyn speaks about her failed marriage in terms which hint at the main way men will fail her: “I could touch him,” she says of her former husband, “but he wasn’t there.” Even Gay, who seems almost ruthless, now, in his lack of sustained attachment, admits to being shocked by the end of his own marriage, which collapsed when he found his wife in bed with his cousin. “In those days I thought you got married and that was it,” he says to Roslyn. “But nothing’s it. Not forever.” “That’s what I can’t get used to,” she replies. “Everything’s changing.” Divorce and heartbreak are everywhere in the world of The Misfits, and relations between men and women seem unmoored from old, comforting verities.
The great insight of Arthur Miller’s piercing script—adapted from his own earlier short story, and written as his marriage to Monroe was falling apart—is that men like Gay and Guido can be sympathetic victims (of infidelity, of fate) but also predatory and cruel. Both men are laser focused on Roslyn from the moment they meet her, and when the two convince Roslyn and Isabelle to make a trip up to Guido’s half-finished cabin, their competition for her affections becomes pronounced. Wallach’s Guido shows flashes of anger, early and often, at the way this competition seems to be playing out; he visibly bristles when Gay tries to pay for the group’s drinks at their first meeting, and cuts in with barely-contained fury when he returns from an errand to find Gay and Roslyn dancing. Told by Gay not to step on her feet, he almost snarls his response: “Don’t worry. She knows how to get out of the way.” The truth is that Guido is overmatched in this contest, not just by Clark Gable’s weathered good looks or Gay’s leathery charm, but by the latter’s superior understanding of what Roslyn wants. Guido thinks he can win Roslyn by doing things for her: inviting her to his house, offering to let her stay there, bringing the car around so she can dance while the radio plays. Gay understands that the way to win this game is just to stay close to her, to lean in, refresh her drink, hang around the cabin helping out. Her vulnerability and desperation for intimacy will do the rest.
The tragedy of Roslyn is that she knows what she wants, and can’t stop trying to get it, no matter how many times it hurts her. She wants to know men, to learn who they are, to see them up close and not just as much as they’ll let her. She pleads with Gay and Guido repeatedly, not just for her own sake, but on behalf of her gender; she is not flattered to be told she is better than the other women they’ve known, women she can see wanted the same thing she did, and didn’t get it. When Gay expresses his delight that she’s uneducated, saying he’s found educated women too inquisitive, she reproves him: “Maybe they’re just trying to get to know you better.” When Guido tells her his wife couldn’t dance with him, that she had none of Roslyn’s grace, Roslyn asks why he didn’t teach her, why he didn’t show her these things he could do. “You see, she died, and she didn’t know how you can dance. To a certain extent, maybe you were strangers.” He bristles again, and she hastens to explain herself, in the first of the film’s many clear statements of purpose: “I only meant that if you loved her, you could have taught her anything. We’re all dying, aren’t we—all the husbands and all the wives, every minute, and we’re not teaching each other what we know.” That’s what Roslyn dreams of, for herself and for the women who are already dead: a world where the husbands and wives know they’re dying, that there isn’t time to lie, or to be cruel, or to hold one another apart. There’s time enough only for truth, for connection.
It’s no use, though. The men of The Misfits want Roslyn, but they don’t want to give her what she needs. They’ll do things for her, plenty of things, but only because she’s Roslyn, because she’s Marilyn Monroe. They will do things in the expectation of payment in kind, and even there they won’t proceed beyond certain limits. They won’t stretch to creating a new version of themselves, a kinder world, a more honest and equal form of gendered relation. Gay will help Roslyn finish Guido’s house, will help her dig out and plant a garden, but he won’t become something other than what he is. When he finds that rabbits have been chewing the lettuce, he grabs his gun; Roslyn is horrified, she can’t abide killing, and it tears at her that Gay can simply brush aside her feelings where it really counts. Gay, however, is implacable. “I never worked like that for anybody,” he says sharply. “And I didn’t do it for some bug-eyed rabbit.” We know who he did it for, what he wanted in return. And we know something else, now, something Roslyn glimpses here for the first time: he will not, above all, be told what to do.
Better Than Wages
A particular vision of American production looms large over the Western genre, as it does over the early history of the United States. A long-lived American ideology saw the country as a nation of independent producers: the yeoman farmers of Jefferson’s fancy, shopkeepers, artisans, male property owners fueled by a Protestant ethic rather than idle and inherited wealth. Full citizenship, with all its rights and privileges, would accrue only to these men, with their proven spirit of industry and their material stake in the property order. The necessarily permanent underclass of the nation would be enslaved; for everyone else, wage labor would be at most a temporary stage of life, a kind of apprenticeship or time-serving, inevitably to be followed by the assumption of one’s own proper place in the propertied class. All adult white men, in this vision, would work for themselves, on however grand or humble a scale, and the potential unruliness and radicalism of a class promised nothing but misery and alienation would be controlled by violence and circumscribed by racial ideology. Labor ‘peace’ would be an enduring condition of the new nation.
This vision, at least to hear the Western tell it, would become one of the driving engines of American imperialism and westward expansion. What settlers chased across the Mississippi and towards the Pacific was, as much as anything, a fantasy of membership in the propertied order: the idea that what waited amidst the rolling plains and gold-rich hills of the West was productive independence, a farm, a ranch, a working gold claim. It would have to be fought for, of course, wrestled by force from the hands of Natives and vigorously protected from acquisitive industrialists and northeastern financiers; portrayed in Westerns, almost always, as hot on the heels of the American frontiersman, handmaidens of civilization and ‘progress’ whose arrival spelled doom for the dream of the independent producer. This is one of the archetypical conflicts of the American Western, from Shane to McCabe and Mrs. Miller to Deadwood and beyond. Though women could certainly play this role—one thinks of formidable characters played by Barbara Stanwyck in The Furies (1950) or Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (1954)—conventionally this independence was strongly male-coded, something men might win and women might latterly share. This element of the genre envisions the American frontier as a space where the masculine entrepreneurial spirit made its tragic final stand against monopoly capitalism, and lost.
This spirit is represented in The Misfits—as elsewhere in the genre—by the cowboy, both as a symbol in itself and as a characteristic set of labor forms. We see this when Isabelle first meets Gay, and ribs him—with cynical affection—about the essential uselessness of cowboys. “That may be,” he replies easily. “But it’s better than wages.” This invocation of ‘wages’ becomes a repeated motif in the film, suggesting that the cowboy represents more than just an affect, a set of lifestyle choices; it’s an approach to work, to compensation, and to the ever-tightening fist of the market. Guido is working for wages when we meet him, but only until he can afford to put a new engine in his truck; even this seems like a worrying precedent to Gay, who jokes that if Guido stays much longer in this job he’s going to “get in the habit.” When we meet Montgomery Clift’s young Perce Howland, he’s similarly at loose ends; his family owns a farm, but his mother has remarried, and his stepfather has threatened him with that ultimate indignity, wages on the land he ought to own. To varying degrees and in different ways, all three men are chasing something of the West’s erstwhile promise, looking to live on their own terms by whatever fitful means remain.
The choices left to them are not inspiring. There’s the rodeo, which Gay suggests he has competed in before, and which Perce is looking to join when the others find him in a gas-station phone booth. We see him compete twice and be badly thrown both times, first by a bucking bronco and then by a bull; the second time he’s kicked in the head for good measure, and Gay has to haul him out before he’s trampled or gored. This is another cruelty Roslyn cannot understand. She cannot understand why Perce risks himself, why everyone watches and cheers, why they let him ride the bull while still clearly concussed from the horse. She cannot understand why these men are so merciless, even to themselves. Guido is visibly perturbed by her concern for Perce, though we see no sign of romance in it, though we see her care goes anywhere she thinks it might matter. “Why don’t you give your sympathy somewhere it’s appreciated?” he asks. “Where’s that?” she replies, a little wryly.
After the rodeo there is ‘mustanging’ in the mountains, the subject of a harrowing sequence which covers the film’s entire final half hour. Guido and Gay have done it many times before, can remember herds of mustangs thousands strong; they were sold as plow-horses to frontier settlers, and riding horses for their children. Now that’s all gone, the settlers and their plows, and of the mustangs themselves only a pitiful handful remain, to be chased down and hog-tied and left for the trucks that will take them to be turned into dog food. It’s a pathetic spectacle, which even the men recognize will earn them next to nothing; it exposes the essential vanity, the cheap copper taste of their fantasies of independence. It drives Roslyn to stage her final rebellion, in a heart-stopping wide shot that picks out her tiny silhouette against the vast salt flats. She is screaming, shrieking herself hoarse, but barely audible at this distance; you can just hear her call the men butchers, murderers. “You’re only happy when you see something die,” she screams. “You and your ‘God’s country’! ‘Freedom’!” She’s seen enough, these past few days, to recognize the gruesome reality disguised by Gay’s cornpone platitudes. She understands that freedom from wages is purchased with blood.
She understands, also, that the world these men have built out here has no real room for women. She’s been treated well enough by Gay and Guido, so far as it goes, but she knows—and we know—that this honeymoon period won’t last; the men want what they want, and sooner or later they’ll get it, or hurt somebody trying. Her attempt to thwart the mustang hunt reveals how both men feel about her wishes, her right to be heard. Guido offers to end the hunt, but only in exchange for romantic or sexual favors; her angry rejection taps into his considerable reserves of bitterness and spite, and in the end he heaps scorn on all women, their demands, their alien minds. Gay, for his part, resolves to give her the mustangs, until she offers to pay him for them; this offends his pride, his sense of masculine independence, and he drives the hunt to its exhausting conclusion, relenting only when his control has been reasserted. This has been part of the frontier dream all along, as inextricable from Gay’s lifestyle as the forms of labor that sustain him. When Gay and Roslyn depart together, Guido expresses his envy and resentment as contempt at Gay’s surrender to the invisible hand: “Where you gonna be? At some gas station polishing windshields? Making change in the supermarket? Try the laundromat, they need a fella there to load the machines!” Freedom from wages and freedom from women are joined in Guido’s mind, and in the world of The Misfits. Productive independence is a masculine dream, and the violence it requires is patriarchal.
* * *
The Western has been capable of elegiac notes since its inception, and the closing of the American frontier is a durable theme of the genre. Even Westerns set in the nineteenth century can speak wistfully of a world already slipping away, of encroaching civilization and vanishing forms of frontier life. John Williams’ classic novel Butcher’s Crossing, set in 1873, chronicles the decline of the Plains buffalo in terms that uncannily mirror the trajectory of ‘mustanging’ in The Misfits, while the TV adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, set in the same period, presents the Montana Territory as an Eden to be seen “before the bankers and lawyers all get it.” There is no sense of gradual evanescence in The Misfits, however, no real glimpse of a West in the process of slipping away. The old West is dead, and men like Gay are just picking at the bones. As the film ends Guido is still chasing the frontier dream, the dream of another mountain, another herd; but we know, and Gay does too, that there are no other mountains, no more herds. Everything is wages now, and the world looks more like Reno every day.
Just how tragic an outcome this is remains an open question. Gay paints a picture of work that was once pure, transformed in its moral valence only by a shifting context: “They changed it all around,” he laments. “Smeared it all over with blood.” He suggests that it’s the dwindling numbers of the mustang that make the whole business look sordid, that hunting vast herds through these mountains had an essential dignity, now lost through no fault of his. But we know better, of course. The land the hardy mustangs plowed was captured in blood, the soil was watered with it; the horses themselves may not have been slaughtered, but the hands of the settlers they served were red. Gay may flatter himself that his own hands were clean, but he helped feed a vast and genocidal machine, and he finds himself surplus because the work is mostly finished. Another machine is whirring into motion now in the settled spaces of the West, or perhaps it’s the same machine, altered only in the value it places on men like Gay.
The specter of death that hangs over this film represents more than just the curdled dream of the West, of course. Clark Gable died mere days after The Misfits finished filming; Monroe lived only a year and a half after its release; even Montgomery Clift, the film’s symbol of wayward youth and innocence, would survive only another few years. With the fates of the actors in mind the key performances become almost overdetermined; it’s almost too easy to reflect on Gable’s weary struggle with a life that’s slipping away, Clift’s effortless portrayal of a young man too good for this world. And of course, Monroe’s raw, anguished confrontation with a world that owed her better, with the men that desired her but gave her no more than that. “Don’t you let them grind you up,” Clift tells her towards the midpoint of the film, but of course they did, and there are times when The Misfits feels like you’re watching them do it. It’s a reminder that Hollywood, too, is the West, with all its mythic qualities, its sordid history, its undercurrent of violence barely subsumed.
The Misfits nominally gets its happy ending, as perhaps it had to. Gay and Roslyn drive away from the salt flats together, revisiting an earlier conversation in which they revealed their fear of having a child together. Roslyn is no longer afraid, she says; they could raise the right kind of child, “a child who could be brave from the beginning,” and not just after a lifetime spent battered against the rocks. The film, and the genre, give us reason to doubt. The closing suggestion that Roslyn and Gay will “find their way back in the dark” recalls a later Western, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, with its haunting image of Ed Tom’s father “carrying the fire” into a dark and a cold Ed Tom feels more keenly than ever. The world of the Western is growing no kinder, its children no braver; the machine whirrs on, both new and old in its casual brutalities, and offers no new comforts to the men and women in its path.