No traumatic event precipitated the following post, which is good. No distasteful opinions burrowing, rodent-like, into the warm and innocent folds of my grey matter, ripping out axons longer than a baby’s arm in the effort, causing a rapidly-deteriorating me to somehow drool electricity while my level of control over basic motor function plunges steadily from “human” to “corn-on-the-cobb,” the entire process observed impassively by the only part of my mind worth preserving, my Movie Opinions, as they sip chamomile from the safety of a panic room that I constructed years ago in the part of the brain typically reserved for generating feelings of happiness. Nope, just writing about a criminally underseen movie in the hope that other people might want to see it, too. It’s a good flick!

Slow West 

I don’t know if you know this but the American frontier circa the mid-to-late nineteenth century was a Hard Place, a land pockmarked exclusively with Grim Poetry and stories constructed solely to remind listeners that stories have no purpose, showing out in this miserable fashion like the face of a syphilis-ravaged harlot on her way for another night of degradation and humiliation at the saloon, a never-ending carousel of nightly offenses and namelessly identical badmen popping in and out with clockwork regularity and no interest in her outside of how they can depress her spirits to depths matching her form, because you see war, war never changes, and a man must accept the harrowing reality of it all, how life’s pleasures and the capacity to weave events into meaningful narrative are nothing more than a weak delusion shielding you, a child, from the simple truth that your entire existence boils down to being either alive or dead with absolutely nothing in between, and how under a particularly unrelenting afternoon heat generated by that bastard the sun – the sick warden of this borderless prison, but at least he’s fair – the two conditions don’t seem so different after all, while the marrow of your very bones sublimates into a grosser kind of poison still, the kind that cripples a man in ways far worse than the physical, until he stalks these dunes as vile as the nature that birthed him.

The above sentiment is incredibly stupid and nearly turgid at the very thought of itself, so of course it has wormed its way into cultural ubiquity, rocketing like a top prospect in a minor league farm system from some vague image of “toughness, graduate student edition” that might flash half-formed across your mind after watching a John Wayne movie to a bronze-cast statue standing astride a castle built from semi-erect and easily-confused penises labeled “male insecurity.” Not all Westerns are like this, of course. Warlock approaches the difficulty of finding meaning against the towering indifference of it all with a soft and empathetic touch, and the True Grit remake grounds the usual Cohen Brothers’ nihilism against an engaging story of a haggard old lawman and a young woman who might be the only person alive as stubborn as he is. But it is, for the most part, a whole lot of wank, wank. It’s like seeing the sun-bleached skeletal remains of a steer touches something in the most primal part of a person’s brain, confirming some long-held (and I’m talking genetic memory, here, people) belief that nothing actually matters, that we’re all just here to eat, fuck, die, and be used as compost to grow another meaningless automaton of a meat bag with, and any argument to the contrary – one that posits, oh, I don’t know, the existence of literally anything other than the above offered – is just weakness and delusion. I guess there’s a whole opportunity for study latent in how universal this opinion sometimes seems to be but, try as I might to delve into it, to extricate some meaning, even for the purposes of a movie review, wank, wank. I think that might be the point.

John Maclean’s Slow West – which was his first fucking feature, the precocious scamp! – is brilliant not for charging with self-congratulatory heroism towards the glorious House of Dumb I have described above, aiming to destroy it penis-shaped-brick-by-cock-molded-mortar, one clever revisionist take at a time, but for just kind of shrugging, accepting that, well, maybe it was like that, who am I to say, and then, and this is the important part, still refusing to stare, hypnotized, at the insipid bog of Hard Truths that enraptures so many other writers of Westerns and instead asking himself what kind of story would spring from this nihilistic armpit, how would people respond and how would it inform their experience to be in a world built upon a canvas so imperfectly reclaimed from death and silence that even an origin story can’t help but be an elegy, and even the most meaningful moment is seemingly only ever allowed life to the extent that it can be used as a punchline by a comically indifferent universe. Instead of stopping at “well, I guess life sucks,” and rhapsodizing over that boring and unchallenging observation Maclean wonders aloud what kind of house you would build – what kind of house could you build – when the only material available is designed to collapse in on itself. The result is something that only seems subversive because the clarity of its conclusion is so contrary to the steaming piles of confused man-logic that have come before it, but in reality it is a vision admirably true to itself and looking to prove itself to no one.

You Zag All You Want, Big Guy, I’m Gonna Zig

Alright, so what does that last sentence of the previous section mean? I’m glad I asked. The usual conclusion arrived at when considering how to decide structure and form in a Western, how to depict a land steeped so in death and emptiness is basically, and it really does seem to boil down only to this, grimness in different flavors. You have your aggressively unromantic (Bone Tomahawk), your dignified insignificance (3:10 to Yuma), your elegiac (Unforgiven, making its second appearance in my first three posts; good job, Clint), etc. But Maclean’s approach is to acknowledge that this experience, one of constantly being butted up against sudden, unromantic, mean-spirited, blunt-to-the-point-of-being-kind-of-funny death would actually create a feeling of the uncanny more so than the grr grim-nuggins mcgoo. And this is fucking brilliant! We as the creators and consumers of stories alight upon the grim as our preferred vector of understanding the West because we’re not in any real danger when we do it. It’s the perfect dodge! It’s like the guy who rambles about his hypothetical behavior in bizarrely-specific situations. “If I was ever in a park and some guy showed up and started through knives at people I’d take him down with karate.” This is very dumb, and the conclusion to this weird scenario – “I would do something manly because men do manly things” – is borne from, among other probably more pronounced pathologies, the realization that said situation will never happen. But imagine if it actually did! Some jerkoff throwing a knife into your hand while you’re squinting at him from thirty paces and thinking to yourself “is that dude holding a throwing knife?” That’s not grim, it’s fucking surreal! Maclean realizes, wonderfully, that a life spent in the immediate company of death has more in common with the works of Hans Christian Andersen, or maybe Kafka, than John Wayne. And it’s not just satire, or irreverence, or an inability to understand the grimness of the word that causes him to reach this conclusion. The perpetual squint of John Wayne is the inability to understand the grimness of the world because portraying unrelenting death as a tough but reliable friend is fucking stupid. Death is depressing, and it destabilizes you and your perception of the environment in ways that would absolutely sometimes be funny and weird to other people, and even yourself! The uncanny can be more indicative of tragedy than the performatively miserable, or the indulgently austere.

I Specialize in Landscapes

The discontinuous nature of the environments visited in the story helps to prove this point. There’s usually a unifying visual theme in Westerns, that of sparsely-populated-but-overwhelmingly-massive-indifference, that reminds us of the ubiquity of death in this world, this place, and how it stretches to every visible border and beyond. Wide shots, is what I’m saying. And the more yellows and browns the better; remember, there’s nothing out here except your meaningless demise. But Slow West, that big playful pig, instead marches Silas and Jay through a series of tightly-framed and visually-diverse environs. We have the ashen-forest in which they meet, the purple fields they ride through early on in their time together, the forest surrounding Rose’s farm, the supply store in the middle of nowhere, and on, and on, like the turning of pages in a storybook. In almost all of these places people die, just like in a “normal” Western; hard and horrible they go, because Maclean doesn’t deny the fucking rudeness of the world. But it’s in the response, how the physical landscape is perceived by the characters that Slow West does its best work. To drift from one instance of pointless and easily-avoided death to another doesn’t put hair on Jay and Silas’s chests, it puts them in a fucking fugue state, each instance of life snatched so cruelly and so suddenly away that it would be insane and inhuman to treat these instances like some welcome organic whole, some confirmation of Life’s Hard Truth, so instead they are hermetically-sealed into their own tragic micro-story by a brain totally not ready for this shit, desperately and for its own sanity compartmentalizing all this otherwise overwhelming sadness into a series of storybook-framed murder dioramas, where the bodies will remain, somehow excised from our continuing world and their ghosts locked safely away (hey, remember the very end of the movie, when we visit the corpses of those who died along the way? Almost like we’re flipping back through the pages of the book, isn’t it, like being reminded of the sad evolutionary chain that brought us here, sure, but also being reminded that, there they are, the dead, still preserved in their isolated storybook pages) from the more impressionable elements of our minds. What may seem like irreverence is anything but; it’s a truer representation to how a person would respond to a world carved from death than anything generated by a salty and weathered protagonist squinting emptily into a meaningless sun. And talking about the landscape is only part of the story, because the people who populate these pages derive sanctuary this way, too.

Of Course It’s a Fairy Tale

Let’s go back to that supply store for a second. Physically it’s storybook-esque, but let’s look at the guy who runs it. He specifically points out to the man robbing him, whom he will shoot dead in a few moments, and whose wife will shoot him dead shortly thereafter, that robbing the store is pointless because it’s the only place for miles where money can even be spent. This could be considered just an irreverent commentary on the undeveloped nature of the territory they’re in but it also stresses that the supply store owner himself is preserving his own mind in a kind of insular storybook logic; he’s the Merchant, doing Merchant Things, even if those things don’t in any way link up to, oh, I don’t know, an economy or society or anything even vaguely practical. He’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, setting up shop in a place where money is completely useless! But he takes some solace in it; it allows him to have a Role in all of this, and speak empathetically, even kindly, to people who are robbing him, one of whom will kill him soon, one of whom he will kill. The saddest moment of the whole sequence, to me, isn’t even when they all exchange lead and die, Tarantino-style, it’s the exact moment when the store owner pulls his rifle out, because that’s when he accepts the futility of his own narrative against the ubiquity of a hard death, acknowledges that his protected and personable status of Merchant has now been rendered a wafer-thin joke of a shield by the inevitable arrival of the real law ‘round these parts, the presence that really came through that door when all the audience saw was two incompetent thieves. There’s no waxing moronic about this like you’d see in other Westerns, no monologues about the hardness of life, as if the state of being dead was the real character being studied, the real and necessary target of our empathy or, stranger still, our admiration; Maclean makes sure the characters are our eternal focus and the things that happen to them are understood as being thrown into sharper relief by the omnipresent nature of death, with death itself never being granted the honor of receiving a focused or empathetic cinematic gaze.

And how about the story told towards the end of the movie – and this is one of my favorite sequences in the whole film – by one of the posse members? His recollection of trying to convince his riding partner that he’s a wanted man to satisfy the young man’s idiot ego (itself an entire kind of sub-storybook storybook moment that further illustrates just how pervasive this preserving logic really is) is another example of a person being so broken by the nonstop fascination with death swirling all about him that he attempts compartmentalize it in the form of a story. He’s sad about the young man’s outlook on life, sad about what happened in his own attempts to quell the boy’s bloodlust, even if the other bounty hunters just think the point of the story is nothing more than a cheap laugh. He’s structuring his grief and regret and his own mental unwinding at living in this awful world in the form of a story irreverently told and presented because it’s not just the physical landscape that takes flight to the uncanny to protect itself it’s also the minds of the people who live there. Once again, Maclean doesn’t avoid painting his frame with nihilism; he accepts that as a consequence of the genre. But he uses those brush-strokes to throw the human element of the story into sharper and oftentimes surreal relief, always stressing what death means to them, rather than just obsequiously rendering loving portrait after loving portrait of loss and misery, some weird cult-like worship of a thing you’re typically not supposed to be a fan of.

A Grim and Inevitable Marriage

So what does this all lead to, this weird footrace between Death and How We Respond to It, Seriously Someone Help Me Preserve My Humanity? Well, it’s a movie, so, a climax. And while Slow West doesn’t disappoint from a traditional standpoint of bringing all our through-lines together into a shooty-bang-bang finale it also excels spectacularly at bringing together fully, for the first time, its own conception of the consequences of life lived against an indifferent death and the takeaway that pretty much everybody else has. So while we can be entertained by the final shootout (and we should be! It’s really good!) we can also appreciate the salt in the wound, the moment when the preserving power of whimsy and the unrelenting hand of death have been commingling for so long that they’ve finally just decided to join narrative forces, like each one has just confessed that if they were a woman the one man they would have sex with would be John Stamos, and then they ran off to do karate together in the basement. The brutality of the final sequence (Rose’s dad just unceremoniously shot without a word in his own defense, Jay’s mortal wound coming courtesy of his distracted and, yes, as a result momentarily indifferent, lady) is butted up against how surreally beautiful the farm is, the startling yellows of the field around the house almost hard to make out under a sky nearly impossibly blue. I mean, when Kotori fires that arrow into the corn field to smoke out/hopefully murder their assailants we get a shot of the projectile flying through the air that looks like it’s something out of a fucking Wes Anderson movie. And what about when Ben Mendelsohn shoots the other bounty hunter, emerging from behind the scarecrow to do it? That shot is so damned blue-sky-gorgeous that it takes a second to fully process that murder is happening. We’re seeing in these moments the sanctifying unreality that these people have been forced to alight upon for the purposes of self-preservation locked in a dead heat with that ever-present fatalism that will be good-and-goddamned if it’s giving up the narrative steering-wheel that easy. There are two (well, three) interests at stake in the final shootout from a plot standpoint, but we’re also watching the human desire for some kind of narrative outside the auspices of death locked in mortal heat with old Dead-y himself, and that fight is just as interesting, and told with masterful simultaneity.

The End

I want this stinky Leroy in under ten-ish pages, so we’re keeping this part short: So Jay is a moron, I guess, and each step he took in his fantasy of seeing Rose again was only another purchase made on the ledger of life’s eternal bookie, an account forever culminating in an interest payment that takes the form of your own moment of inglorious kersplat-ness. But, fuck, he still made it to that house, didn’t he, borne more than a little bit on the currents of some clearer kind of water than the tepid stuff all the other Western protagonists more-or-less slosh around in, never too bothered by how brown it all is? Hell was coming for the kid either way; at least being a delusional weenie helped him stay ahead of it for a little longer than someone insufferably looking forward to their own demise.