You ride him up in that blind path,
and you took that knife of yours and you cut him from end to end.
Yes I did.
D.H. Lawrence wrote that ‘the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.’
The quote is used at the beginning of Hostiles, which tells the story about a battle-hardened captain
who has to escort his former enemy to his ancestral home.
This will be done.
And it will be done by you.
Along the way, we learn about America’s long history of violence.
I hate them.
I got a warbag of reasons to hate them.
And the fundamental problem of coming to terms with a past that cannot be undone.
For even after the public opinions changed, the crimes had been formally condemned,
and all the old grievances seemed to have been reconciled with...
a fatal wound is still inflicted;
the Native American has been severed from his family, his culture and his history.
Condemned to live on as a lost soul.
Bad news is you're never gonna be the same.
You're never gonna be whole.
Not ever again.
Wind River reveals the unforgiving reality of life in the Indian reservations,
the appointed home for the Native Americans.
After the murder of a young girl, a close friend of the grieving family joins the investigation
to find justice in a place that structurally fails to provide this.
I’m a hunter, Marvin.
What do you think I’m doing?
The story echoes the deeper wounds of the past,
the loss of wholeness that occurred more than a 100 years earlier.
It just riles me the way the government treats them, that’s all.
They’re human beings. They deserve to be treated as such.
And need I mention they were here first? – that’ll do
That they’re dispossessed at our hand and have received nothing – That’s enough.
There is an undeniable anger and sadness here, but as these films also show;
they are not the only ones who have suffered.
Americans carry the collective pain of a nation built on violence;
A nation that, if it were to restore that wrongdoing, would cease to exist.
but more importantly; they too are individual human beings who have known loss and pain,
who have faced injustice and tragedy.
I get so mad I want to fight the whole world.
You got any idea what that feels like?
I do.
So despite everything that divides them, after so much anger and cruelty,
so many years of hatred being met with hatred, murder with murder,
of having lost, of being torn by violence,
we find it is exactly this grief, this sorrow that binds them.
These are not the first westerns that have made this point, that have moved beyond the
black and white depictions of morality to explore the complexity of American History.
I'm not gonna stand here and tell you that life's fair, because it ain't.
To either of us.
But, you know, what do we do?
But what really struck me about Hostiles and Wind River
is how they deal with this deep, underlying sorrow resulting from its implications.
Like many films, they show the desire for justice, the longing for a reckoning.
But as satisfying as this may be, it doesn’t fix what was broken.
It’s not a substitute for the wholeness that was taken.
And yet, this is often where it ends; after all is said and done,
the lone gunslinger wanders off to the horizon; back into the vast landscape of the Wild West.
He is a drifter who has fulfilled his purpose and must now move on.
It reflects the spirit of his ancestors, who, according to D.H. Lawrence
came to America to get away, away from themselves, away from everything, to “henceforth be masterless”.
But as Lawrence emphasizes; this kind of freedom isn’t true freedom, it isn’t wholeness;
“Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away.
The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.
The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.”
In this sense, the escape into the Wild West feels more like a desire to escape the pain,
to not have to face the violence that has been inflicted,
to not have to experience true grief.
I just wanted the bad to go away.
Wanted answers, to questions that couldn’t be answered.
And this, I believe, is where Hostiles and Wind River present a subtle, yet significant
progression of the western genre, and perhaps, of the American soul.
Both films are marked by the acknowledgement of a fundamental sorrow;
of a wound that cannot be healed; a pain that must be carried forever.
It’s a kind of grief that cannot be escaped, that cannot be reconciled with,
but it can be carried together.
And for that, the lone gunfighter no longer rides off into the sunset,
no longer isolates himself.
He stays.
Not for judgement, not for salvation, but just to share the pain.
Got time to sit with me?
Oh, I ain’t going nowhere.