Hi everyone. In a move that I hope doesn’t produce too prodigious an outburst of groaning and eye-rolling, I’m going to borrow an idea that’s becoming increasingly common on here and write periodically - maybe once a month - about what, in general, I’ve been reading and watching. I’m doing this for three reasons. The first is to check in with subscribers during the period between my more formal essays, which take a little longer and arrive, as it were, when the spirit wills. (My next one is already in progress, but is proving labor-intensive.) The second is to write something a little more relaxed and conversational, a break (for both me and you) from the more painstaking and slightly high-flown style of the bigger pieces. The third is just to share some thoughts that might never become full essays but are nonetheless scratching at the inside of my skull. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll already know what movies I’ve been watching; but these newsletters will give me the space to talk in more holistic terms, to work through my broader preoccupations, to observe connections between and across films. I hope you’ll enjoy these broadcasts well enough, but if you don’t, they’ll always be easy to skip.
Without further ado:
Reading
If you’ve been paying attention to my movie posting recently, or if you read my previous newsletter on The Misfits (1961) you will not be surprised to discover that I recently finished Butcher’s Crossing, a switchblade-sharp 1960 western novel by John Williams. This book appears alongside Oakley Hall’s Warlock and a few others on a shortlist of midcentury novels with a fanatical following among fans of the literary western, and it’s not hard for me to see why. It’s a short, precise, no-nonsense book, laser-focused on a single buffalo hunt in 1870s Colorado. The hunt is bankrolled by young Bostonian Will Andrews, who sees it as a chance to find himself in the Western wilds, and to learn from a hardened hunter named Miller, who becomes the expedition’s leader. The resulting confrontation with nature is rendered with the kind of lyrical meticulousness that, in the hands of a skilled writer, becomes a species of drama unto itself; Williams’ clear determination to present the hunt with matter-of-factness and exactitude never becomes the least bit rote or tedious. It also never prevents the book from achieving thematic richness: this is a novel about a vanishing Western lifestyle of astonishing, almost industrial brutality, which asks if transcendental unity with nature can possibly be achieved on the imperial frontier. In reading up on it afterwards I found that it was made into a modestly-received 2022 film starring Nicolas Cage as Miller; let me know in the comments if, by some strange chance, you saw it.
On the nonfiction side I finally had the chance to read John Ganz’s recently published When The Clock Broke, which I have eagerly anticipated since it was first announced. Though its earliest chapters and substantial background material are set earlier, this is mostly a book about 1992, a year which saw the emergence of a set of political forces with long, loud, tragic afterlives. Ganz writes engagingly of a “politics of national despair,” given early voice by the gubernatorial and presidential campaigns of David Duke, coalescing further in the presidential candidacies of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, broadcast across the newly-flourishing radio kingdom of Rush Limbaugh, inflecting the politics of race and policing in post-Rodney King LA and what would become Rudy Giuliani’s New York. Ganz does not belabor his broader argument, letting his narrative chapters largely speak for themselves; it’s a rich portrait, and much less overdetermined or monocausal than what I say next might suggest. With or without his help, however, it’s hard not to see the long tail of each episode, or to notice a particular New York real estate dipshit making the occasional portentous cameo. This bizarre hothouse of paleoconservative intellectuals, brazen shock jocks, rancid cop bosses, and flamboyant criminals, nourished by racial resentment, crony capitalism, and sociocultural change, produces an all-too-familiar sequence of amoral con artists coming this close to the halls of power, leaving their sticky fingerprints on every surface of American political and civil life. It was just a matter of time, the book never quite says, before one of these dogs caught the car.
I’ve also just finished The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States, by Benjamin Waterhouse, whom I knew a little at UNC as a very nice guy and snappy dresser. This is a relatively brief and very accessible survey work, but it’s also one of my favorite kinds of historical writing: an attempt to recast a historical master narrative, to render the familiar instructive through a simple change in focus. As the subtitle suggests, this is not a history of American business, but a business history of America, which takes productive forces and the interests and institutions that develop around them not as ancillary but defining features of our national past. It’s possible to imagine as many histories like this as there are subfields of American history, but the thing is that this one convinces; it’s not a complete picture, of course, but it has tremendous internal solidity, built as it is around the basic material conditions of American life. It is essentially an introduction to the history of American capitalism and its contributions to the overall shape of our social landscape. In my (now largely erstwhile) career as an academic arguably my main interest was in the kinds of narratives people are conditioned to see as ‘properly’ historical, the aspects of an immeasurably vast and variegated past we assign the status of Mainline History; in my field, as in many others, this means mainly certain kinds of politics and war. “How do I come to be standing at this Exxon station by the highway” is not, I think, the starting point for most culturally mainstream narratives of the American past. But the fruits of an investigation that begins this way are evident here.
Watching
Again, if you follow me on Twitter you know that I have circled back into Oater Mode in the last month or so. I blame The Misfits, or maybe Butcher’s Crossing, or maybe Costner’s Horizon: Chapter 1 (2024), which I enjoyed, and which seems to have put my corner of Film Twitter in a renewed state of western fever. But the truth is I expect regular outbreaks of this deadly condition to afflict me indefinitely; having discovered this genre in earnest (going beyond my dorm-room exposure to Unforgiven, a handful of Fords, a handful of Leones, etc.) only a couple years ago, I think a switch has been thrown, and I do not expect ever to become normal again.
Most of my western viewing lately has been unsurprisingly situated in the 1950s, when the genre was an undisputed industry powerhouse and, alongside stalwarts like Ford, filmmakers like Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Delmer Daves were delivering some of its most bracing and morally complex works. Daves in particular is new to me this month; his 3:10 to Yuma (1957), an absolute masterpiece, needs no introduction, but I happened to dive in first with his Broken Arrow (1950), a fascinating if unquestionably flawed Hollywood experiment in the sympathetic depiction of Natives in a western. I was brought to it by James Stewart, by some distance my favorite western star, and he’s a strong anchor for a laudably thorny narrative about 1870s efforts to forge peace on the Apache frontier. The near-impossibility of achieving such a peace in the face of insatiable white thirst for land is also a theme of Horizon, which shows early potential (in its admittedly-inchoate Part-One form) for an unusually canny presentation of how settler colonialism often functions, with the geopolitical and military interests of a state sometimes at odds with the material demands of settlers on the ground. This is, of course, one of the formative clashes that birthed the United States, and there are promising (if only that) signs of Horizon’s willingness to see that theme continue across the history of the western frontier.
Another possible candidate to have kickstarted my renewed western mania is The Wind (2018), a modern quasi-remake of the extraordinary Lillian Gish vehicle of the same name from 1928. There are elements of horror and perhaps hints of the supernatural in the original, but these are ramped up dramatically in the 2018 edition, which depicts a recent settler to New Mexico (Caitlin Gerard) alone in her isolated cabin and seemingly beset by malevolent forces. It should be instantly disqualifying to try and concretize the abstract in a modern remake like this, it should strike me as supremely cynical and unimaginative; in this case, though, the horror western is simply not trite or commercial enough for me to think it’s a major problem here. In fact, these films strike me as far rarer than I think they should be; Ravenous (1999) is one of the richest, most assured westerns of my lifetime, and I hear excellent things about the likes of Bone Tomahawk (2015). But in general I think there is a relatively untapped vein here, something extraordinarily evocative about the idea of settlers and frontiersman encountering nightmares in a place they should not be. The basis for the horror in The Wind is solitude; the protagonist finds herself in a situation where she knows she should be utterly, completely alone, and so any knock at the door is an immediate menace, any light through the window is horrifyingly wrong. Where is everyone? Where did they go? What happens to people who try to make a home where there is nothing but the ghosts—old ones, perhaps, unfathomably old, but also newer ones, the lives that were ended to make this land empty? What do we deserve? The western genre is in a unique position to pose questions like these, and to imagine nightmarish answers.
That’s all for me. See you in a couple weeks when I hope to have completed my next big essay (not wholly unrelated to these questions, as it happens). Thank you so much for supporting this little venture so far.
IMO, Hell or High Water is a great modern take (though now a little dated) western set in the great recession
Was gonna hit you up on Twitter but I'll just say here - I watched 3:10 to Yuma earlier this year, myself, and what a marvel that film is. All the implications b/t Wade and Mrs. Evans sure are something else.