The Mythic West Dies and Rides Again at Hands of Two Atypical Heroes

“From the outset, the emergence of the mythic West was a sure thing. Along the way it has been nurtured by many things — economic frustrations and dreams, an awakening sense of history, a feeling of kinship with the land, and suspicions about the modern world, to mention only a few. But at the start and forever afterwards one of the basic ingredients has been ignorance.”  – The Mythic West, Robert G. Athearn

By Katherine Monk

One follows in the dusty steps of a young male traveller and the horse he is trying to save from a slaughterhouse. The other is a patient tale of a professional rodeo rider hoping to recover from a serious head injury. There are no duels, no gun-slingers in saloons, no marshalling force of power. So neither Lean on Pete nor The Rider are Westerns in the classic sense of the word. Yet, both of these new films from an outsider perspective speak directly to, and engage directly with, the very ideas that form the essence of the American identity: Men, horses, and wide open spaces.

English director Andrew Haigh and Chinese director Chloe Zhao pick up the pony trail of the mythic west in modern times, where the Wal-Marts and McDonalds cut up the frontier into big and small boxes surrounded by seas of black pavement. This is the new America, and while it latches onto the silicon teat and pearl-handled pistols of its idealized Old West, these two new films read like its obituary.

Granted, you could argue the nugget of the American Dream never existed in the first place.

In his final academic tome, The Mythic West, Kansas historian Robert G. Athearn dissects the very heart of the American ideal and concludes the “West” — as we understand it — was always rooted in a desire to deny a sense of truth, particularly the undeniable force of change.

No sooner did the true “westering” days end, than a sense of longing seeped into the American fabric. At the turn of the century, Owen Wister’s The Virginian enshrined the sense of loss and gave birth to the ‘Mythic West’ — an ode to the hard-working, self-driven man who (somewhat inconceivably given the landscape) makes it on his own. Wister made the cowboy the central character for the first time in American literature, and in 1902, it was the right fantasy for a transformative, turn-of-the-century moment.

No sooner did the true “westering” days end, than a sense of longing seeped into the American fabric.

A quilt of exaggerated freedoms to encourage settlement, and convenient fabrications to excite early Eastern readers of Westerns, the myth was invented by the graduates of Yale and Harvard — and quickly absorbed into the desert soil as its own, soon becoming an industry of nostalgia and red-blooded patriotism used to peddle everything from cigarettes to political parties.

“In an effort to create legends and somehow catch up with the rest of the world, we have made heroes of people who are not of the heroic mold, and we have popularized and idolized military figures simply to answer popular demand generated during wartime. After the shooting was over, we broadcast bronze statues of these overnight heroes… preferably in equestrian form, in the town’s square,” writes Athearn, adding that most of these bronze riders were created in the immediate years after the Civil War.

“We have even made heroes of bad men. Psychopathic killers and bank robbers like Billy the Kid.” We ascribe these outlaws heroic qualities because, as film director George Stevens (Shane) said, the people he showed in his westerns should play the “same role for Americans as King Arthur and his knights hold in English mythology.”

We all need heroes, and America seems to crave a hero on a horse.

Creating Trust: Brady Jandreau plays a broken cowboy who teaches horses to trust humans in Chloe Zhao’s The Rider.

“Our heroes have been associated with horses… and we invented the cowboy, a man who was armed, who was a horseman, and who did violent but presumably good things even though he was largely a nameless, faceless figure who herded cows for a living. In our short history, we have probably created more “heroes” by means of publicity and manufactured myth that have any of our sister nations in their long histories.”

Athearn doesn’t condemn America’s willful ignorance — so fundamental to the myth’s propagation — because The West, as an idea, still means something significant to the American soul. It’s where redemption and damnation face off in a daily duel at high noon, the buffalo roam, and cowboys ride off into the sunset as their own free man.

…The West, as an idea, still means something significant to the American soul. It’s where redemption and damnation face off in a daily duel at high noon, the buffalo roam, and cowboys ride off into the sunset as their own free man.

There is an emphasis on “man” in all Westerns. Says film scholar Lee Clark Mitchell in his genre study Westerns: “From the beginning, the Western has fretted over the construction of masculinity — whether in terms of gender, maturation, honour, or self-transformation.”

The answer to every existential question is always clear: “To make a man out of you.” Yet, the what, the how, and the correct moral route is variable — if at all visible.

For Charley, the adolescent at the heart of Lean of Pete, the path to manhood starts off in circles. Well, more like ovals. Charley has been living in Portland with his father, an old jock who wears a baseball cap and jeans, courts the local moms and waitress-types, and has a tendency to spend rent money on beer. But the man with the cowboy strut is also a loving dad. And without a present mother, Charley has no one else in the world outside of his aunt Margy — who he hasn’t seen since he was a small boy.

To make up for the lacking sense of family, and to get some money into the household, he wanders over to the local track, where he meets small-time owner Del (Steve Buscemi) and veteran jockey Bonnie (Chloe Sevigny).

Del is a jaded hustler. He no longer has ambitions of winning the big race or cashing in on stud fees. He’s accepted his place — a poor owner in the sport of kings, happy to have survived the long haul despite a complete absence of glory. The same goes for Bonnie. It’s not about winning any more, it’s about finding comfort in the lifestyle and the community.

For 15-year-old Charley, hanging out with Del and Bonnie is a sweet taste of something close to family. Yet, he forms his deepest connection with a horse named Pete (Starsky), an older racehorse without much of a future. Charley shares Pete’s sense of dislocation, and decides to take the aging thoroughbred on a trip across the American west to save him from the slaughterhouse.

It’s a nice gesture, of course, but stealing a truck, trailer and a horse when you are 15 is a bad idea. No surprise, then, that we always feel fate steaming toward Charley like a runaway semi. Only we have to watch it happen in slow motion.

English director Andrew Haigh (45 Years) infuses every frame with a sense of longing through long shots and a hesitant gait. It’s a lonely search across an empty landscape that conjures every Western cliche.

Twilight Cowboy: Charlie Plummer plays Charley, a kid looking for a home in Lean on Pete.

Knowing his terrain, Haigh plays with every nuance and nod, expanding his frames into 1:85 cinemascope to make sure we’re seeing what he’s seeing: The modern translation of the post-war western told in reverse. Charley moves eastward from Portland to Wyoming and Colorado. He never even gets on the horse. The two simply roam the landscape in an elusive quest for home.

So much of the success of the film — Adapted from Willy Vlautin’s 2010 novel of the same name — is in the mood, and the sense of constant restraint on the part of Haigh. He’s always holding the reins, forcing us to study the scenarios he places before us through Charley’s innocent eyes.

It’s an internal journey that only works because Charlie Plummer wears it all on his face. Haigh paints around him. It’s about how the light hits his soft but emerging features. The way the fading sunset reflects in his shallow-set eyes and glints off his blond hair, forever echoing “Shane!”

So much of the success of the film — Adapted from Willy Vlautin’s 2010 novel of the same name — is in the mood, and the sense of constant restraint on the part of Haigh. He’s always holding the reins, forcing us to study the scenarios he places before us through Charley’s innocent eyes.

It’s about capturing all that is good in the American ideal — the endless potential, but also the alarmingly cold reality. In real terms, the average American has no one to lean on for medical care, or for social help –points articulated in the film through our hero’s brush with the hospital system and homeless substance abusers (Steve Zahn). Charley must lean on Pete, but placing your bets on an old racehorse is like believing in the same old dream. Faith usually falls prey to reality, and the once fecund promise of the open frontier stands barren, stripping away masculine potential and eventually driving a stake through the heart of the mythical cowboy.

The same symbolic zombie dance between the individual and the American Ideal unfolds in Zhao’s The Rider. Young rodeo rider Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) was a star-in-the-making before he was thrown from a bronc and kicked in the head.

The opening scene, shot in soft focus in natural light, shows him removing the staples from his own head dressing with a buck knife. He peels back the bandage to reveal a six-inch zipper from ear to forehead. Brady is told another head injury could be fatal, and even riding a horse could be life-threatening.

Yet, what else are you going to do when you’ve been brought up to be a Lakota cowboy? The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation he calls home isn’t awash in economic opportunity, leaving Brady, his horseman father, and little sister Lilly on the edge of deprivation.

Brady wants to be a man. He wants to be a provider, but like Charley, he can’t actually get up on the horse. This isn’t about symbolic domination and riding the beast on your passage to the promised land. The macho cowboy myth, with his leather chaps and Stetson, has been knocked out of his traditional saddle of social dominance and must learn to walk alongside his steed. The two must develop a new bond, a new level of trust, in order to move forward into a new reality.

The macho cowboy myth, with his leather chaps and Stetson, has been knocked out of his traditional saddle of social dominance and must learn to walk alongside his steed. The two must develop a new bond, a new level of trust, in order to move forward into a new reality.

Zhao, like Haigh, spends a lot of time showing us the various stages of bonding between the young man and the equine co-star, and because her central character is in many ways playing himself, there’s an undeniable authenticity to the whole undertaking — even when the line readings feel stiff.

Zhao found Brady Jandreau while making her debut feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, in 2013. Intrigued by their pale skin and western features, these “Indian Cowboys” appeared to be a perfect contradiction and Zhao always wanted to explore the idea further. When she heard Brady had actually suffered a real-life head injury that put him in a coma for three days, she realized the dramatic potential and approached Jandreau and his family.

The entire Lower Brule Sioux community opened its doors, and Zhao was given full access to this seemingly timeless world where men are trained to rope and herd cattle, break and train horses, and realize the all-American dream of living on the open frontier.

Only it doesn’t look nearly as glamorous as it sounds. There are no sprawling ranch houses. No wide open prairies and monumental rock formations under clear blue skies, just humble bungalows and parcels of barbed-wire-bound acreage under unsettled clouds.

The optics scream “resignation” — because in the end, that’s Brady’s only viable option for reaching manhood. Obviously, he could turn his back on the doctors and his family and decide to go back into the ring. We might even cheer along in a complicit moment of absolute denial, because part of the cowboy ethos is to “dust yourself off and get back on that horse.”

But Brady has a metal plate in his head. He still suffers the symptoms of severe head trauma: nausea, dizziness, forgetfulness, mood swings. He also knows exactly what tragedy looks like thanks to his best friend, Lane Scott (played by the real Lane Scott), a former bull riding champion now confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, or even hold his body upright.

The optics scream “resignation” — because in the end, that’s Brady’s only viable option for reaching manhood. Obviously, he could turn his back on the doctors and his family and decide to go back into the ring. We might even cheer along in a complicit moment of absolute denial, because part of the cowboy ethos is to “dust yourself off and get back on that horse.”

The scenes between real-life friends Brady Jandreau and Lane Scott are the most haunting in the film because every moment, every glance, every unspoken word that collapses into a sigh feels intimate. In the most unexpected twist of genre, it’s love and compassion for each other — and their ability to accept physical weakness and limitation — that infuses both men with the steeliness, and the heroic stature, of iconic western “manhood.”

The same holds true in Lean on Pete. Charley’s bid to find a new home with his horse meets a tragic end. The cowboy myth and manhood can no longer exist in the same frame — the armed horseman who counted on his assertiveness, ingenuity and hard-scrabble potency now has to find a new path to heroism.

Both Lean on Pete and The Rider blaze that new trail for us, and not surprisingly, it doesn’t pass the same genre landmarks along the way. Leveraging their foreign point-of-view on the traditional western vistas, Haigh and Zhao continue a new blend of external revisionism and simultaneous loving homage that includes such films as Scottish director John Maclean’s Slow West (2015) and Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant (2015). You could even count Sergio Leone as an early instigator, looking to draw America’s violent history out of the holster in the wake of Vietnam. Yet, these newer takes are looking in a different direction: They see the violent past, and recognize it as part of the landscape, but they are also living with its consequences in both real and figurative ways.

Both Lean on Pete and The Rider blaze that new trail for us, and not surprisingly, it doesn’t pass the same genre landmarks along the way. Leveraging their foreign point-of-view on the traditional western vistas, Haigh and Zhao continue a new blend of external revisionism and simultaneous loving homage…

Brady lives with a metal plate in his head. His friend is now quadriplegic. Charley is reduced to skin and bone, trekking in search of home in a constant state of hunger. They have been stripped of any opportunity to seize the now-settled frontier, or even mount a horse. The whole concept of “American Red-Blooded Male” simply does not apply. For these boys to become men, they must find a new well of strength, one that’s more heroic than blowing away a bad guy on Main Street. They must find self-love.

To borrow a phrase from the genre, they have to “cowboy up, and embrace their humanity.”

You can’t do that with a gun. Nor can you lasso compassion, or hunt sympathy for your fellow man. All the actions that defined manhood in the western genre no longer fit, killing the old cowboy myth — once more.

Indeed, the obituary for the Western has been written hundreds of times over in the course of the last hundred years. Owen Wister, the very man credited with starting the genre in 1902, mourned the loss of the West from the moment he started writing The Virginian at his home in Philadelphia. And “from the start,” says Athearn, “it has appealed to the ugly side of our national character, our fascination with violence, our fears, our biases, our narrow insecurities about uppity women and swarthy foreigners… Beyond a certain point, however, such sniping becomes irrelevant. Born of the closest thing we have to a collective experience, fed by our need to discover and invent who we are, the myth endures.”

The beauty of the myth, and its embodiment in the western genre, is the ability to transform and adapt to changing times — regardless of the perceived conservative values it appears to hold so dear. So while The Rider and Lean on Pete may feature boys barely past peach fuzz, they signal a new maturity within the once-“infantile” genre. Ironically, this new version of manhood celebrates traits that would have been welcome on the old frontier: sociability, a cooperative approach and an acceptance of certain natural limits without surrendering one’s spirit, or hope for the future. The basic instinct for survival is now tamed by love — at least in the movies, where the West will always be wanted. Dead or alive.

@katherinemonk

Brady Jandreau plays a bronc rider who must find a new way to become a man, using compassion instead of brute strength. Courtesy of Sony Classics.

THE EX-PRESS, April 16, 2018

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