Riding East—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in Hidalgo (2004)

Abstract

in recent years, several scholarly works (e.g., Broughton; Johnson et al.; Mitchell) have revisited one of the oldest genres in film history—the Western—to examine its lasting appeal and its ability to reinvent itself through hybridization with other genres. However, when genre hybridization is considered, research often focuses on so-called weird hybrids1 (see Green; Johnson et al.) or “darker” varieties such as noir and crime fiction crossovers (e.g., Mitchell or Monticone). Joe Johnston's Hidalgo (2004) is unusual in this context, and its ambiguous reception at the time of its release highlights some of the problems that arise when genre conventions are taken too much at face value. A closer analysis of the film, therefore, might demonstrate the value of looking beyond obvious genre tropes toward wider cinematic trends.While Hidalgo was largely dismissed by critics reading it as a Western, I will argue that the film is better understood as part of the revival of spectacular epic cinema at the turn of the millennium, appearing alongside a number of epic films that explored, broadly speaking, a clash of cultures through mythic-historic narratives.2 As such, the film adds another dimension to current debates about the Western, as Hidalgo's nostalgic-ironic reframing of traditional Western tropes together with elements of the epic and the adventure film offers a contemporary mash-up of myths that reflects the global audiences at which it is aimed. As Johnson et al. note, “one of the distinctive features of the western” is perhaps that it can “form unexpected combinations with other genres,” creating odd resonances between those genres (2). Through its playful engagement with the Western, Hidalgo not only offers a novel hybrid and an entertaining spectacle; its self-conscious play with generic conventions also can help us to critically assess the Western's most iconic features.Hidalgo portrays the journey of run-down Western rider Frank T. Hopkins (Viggo Mortensen) and his mustang Hidalgo, who participate in a spectacular race across the Arabian Desert. Yet it is also a journey of self-discovery that highlights contemporary concerns about identity, ethnicity, and class as it reshapes traditional Western patterns. As noted previously, I suggest that Hidalgo is better understood in the context of several blockbuster epics that appeared in the same period and explored the conflict between Western and non-Western ideals. For example, Ridley Scott's Alexander (dir. 2004) featured, among other things, the eastward conquest of the ancient Macedonian king, while Wolfgang Petersen's Troy (2004) showed the conflict between the nation-states of Greece and the Eastern people of Troy. The 2004 version of King Arthur (dir. Antoine Fuqua) reframes the legendary knight as a Roman centurion battling the barbaric hordes of Saxon invaders to protect an emerging British nation, and Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Ridley Scott once again, offers a fictionalized account of the twelfth-century Crusades. These examples underline the tendencies of contemporary epics to represent, as Robert Burgoyne argues, “a transnational orientation and an appeal to cross-cultural structures of belonging and identification” (3). He further notes that it is these cross-cultural structures that encourage “us to look at epics differently, to read them against the grain, to consider them in terms of a post-national project focusing on broad stories of affiliation and community across ethnic, religious and geographic boundaries” (Burgoyne 3). This article aims to offer such a reading against the grain of Hidalgo as transnational epic-Western hybrid, exploring the ways in which the film boldly and self-consciously plays with the symbols and stereotypes evident in Westerns by embedding them in a wider epic tradition. As such, the film follows Lee Broughton's suggestion that “the Western's mix of instantly recognizable symbols and remarkably malleable narrative motifs ultimately enabled it to become a film form that could be readily adapted the world over” (2). Similarly, Johnson et al. also have noted that “despite being ostensibly anchored to a particular geographic location and a fairly precise point in history, the genre continues to be reinvented and hybridized” (1). This includes geographical shifts. By drawing on epic cinema's transnational orientation, the film is able to shift its narrative outside the traditional Western context, while simultaneously maintaining and critiquing its most enduring symbols.On that basis, the approach of this article is threefold. First, it aims to identify the ways in which Hidalgo alludes to the origins of the cinematic Western in older art forms such as nineteenth-century orientalist paintings and adventure novels in order to recreate a nostalgic idea of nomadic equestrian culture, both East and West. Second, it will explore how the film, through its hybrid mode, both draws on and critically challenges aspects of the Western genre emerging from these earlier traditions. Finally, it will look at how traditional Western conflicts (e.g., between Native American and white settler and between the Westerner and the Easterner) are reinterpreted to reflect wider concerns about identity and community. Here, the article will highlight the ways Hidalgo blends those elements derived from the Western with some of the key elements associated with contemporary epics, such as “the multi-ethnic community, the nomadic passage across boundaries . . . and the unknown or anonymous hero” (Burgoyne 82).Hidalgo commences in a very traditional Western setting. Reputedly based on a true story,3 the film starts in late nineteenth-century USA, when the westward expansion was drawing near its end. At the beginning of the film, we encounter long-distance rider Frank T. Hopkins working as an army scout. While delivering a message, he witnesses the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre of Lakota people by the United States Army. This event leaves Hopkins traumatized—a disillusioned drunk burdened by his own feelings of guilt. We later learn that these feelings are further grounded in a deeply personal conflict, as Hopkins turns out to be the son of a Lakota mother and a white army scout. While to the outside world he epitomizes the image of the white cowboy, coming to accept the hidden Native American part of his identity is the focus of his journey of redemption and self-discovery throughout the film. Shortly after the sequence at Wounded Knee, we encounter Hopkins working as a show rider for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, where he is challenged by an Arabian sheikh to join a long-distance race through the Arabian Desert, after the sheikh takes umbrage at the claim that Hopkins's Hidalgo is the world's best long-distance racehorse. On his way to the Middle East, Hopkins encounters the British Lady Davenport, who has her own horse and rider in the race in order to gain breeding rights for the sheikh's Arabian horses. For Hopkins, the perilous journey through the desert becomes a new frontier experience at a time when the American frontier increasingly has become a nostalgic fantasy. As Geoff King has argued, the idea of the frontier is not necessarily limited to the conquest of the American West. Frontier mythologies appear in cinema in a variety of forms, drawing on the fact that the underlying concepts of the myth and its origin in the Western “are sufficiently well entrenched in American culture to provide a repository that can be drawn upon in many different ways” (King 12). As such, the film's shifting of the “frontier” from West to East offers an extension of frontier mythology but also carries with it some of the traditional challenges of the original myth. As I will explore in more detail later in the article, the setting of the film at the end of American westward expansion also indicates a cultural shift, one of which Hopkins is a victim and which fuels his sense of lack of purpose.Hidalgo had modest international success,4 but while generally popular with audiences, it was largely dismissed by critics,5 who in most cases bemoaned either the film's historical inaccuracies (see Gumbel) or its apparent reinforcement of stereotypes (see Fontaine; French; or Kollin). The critics who dismissed the film often focused on reading it in the context of contemporary US politics in the Middle East. They mostly argued that the film, among other things, reinforces orientalist stereotypes, describing it as an instance of “‘benevolent supremacy,’ with the American hero appropriately besting what turns out to be an anachronistic British presence in order to take its place in the region” (Kollin 112), or even dismissing it as “a piece of privately funded pro-American propaganda” (Fontaine 42). This reception of Hidalgo is similar to that of other epics of the time, such as Kingdom of Heaven (2005) and Troy (2004), which were similarly interpreted in the light of recent military interventions (see Sarris; Rothstein). However, this reading of the film is problematic for several reasons. For example, as Edward Buscombe emphasizes, approaches to the Western that aim to link all of its developments to sociocultural influences at the time of their making “run the risk of short-circuiting a system of representation whose genesis actually pre-dates the cinema and whose determinations and effectivity are therefore more extensive than such analyses propose” (25). Also, as Lee Clark Mitchell notes, the problem with the widespread familiarity of the generic codes of the Western is that although “genre expectations may be triggered immediately . . . they can also mislead, if only because they are never really fixed except in the most derivative members of a genre” (237).Moreover, critics who dismiss the film as mere propaganda misunderstand the film on two levels. First, they more broadly overestimate the extent to which mainstream cinema deliberately develops a “propagandist” agenda and underestimate the audience's ability to critically reflect on a story. As King notes, “the reassertion of mythic narratives [in mainstream cinema] can be understood without need to resort to any kind of conspiracy theory assuming the conscious or organized activity of those with material interests in the viability of the myth” (10). Besides, as Matthew Carter points out, “post-structuralist analyses have taught us that so-called ‘resistive’ narratives and ideological agendas that muddy the clear waters of the myth can, more often than not, be found in most Westerns” (81). Second, these critics also overlook the extent to which Hidalgo intersperses its idealized, nostalgic vision with a sense of irony, thus setting “elements of a conventional popular genre in an altered context, thereby making us perceive these traditional forms and images in a new way” (Cawelti 87). Rather than simply casting the American hero as a modernizing force in a backward and nostalgic East, as writers such as Susan Kollin have suggested, the film offers a significant level of ambiguity when it comes to the portrayals of both Western and Eastern societies and with regard to the apparent hero. Since the opening scene at Wounded Knee Creek introduces the US troops squarely as the perpetrators of unprovoked genocide, it seems at the very least problematic to interpret the Americans as representing a benevolent force later in the film. And although films are, of course, always influenced by their sociocultural and political environment, the focus on universal ideas in line with epic conventions rather than one particular political context enables audiences across the globe to interpret the film in light of their own experiences. Monica S. Cyrino has argued that contemporary epics “seek to reach the widest possible international audiences” and are therefore “crafting their narrative strategies to engage with and promote broad cross-cultural and even universal structures of identification” (27). Hidalgo's widespread international distribution and overall success across diverse geographical regions (including the Middle East) clearly supports this notion (see note 4).Correspondingly, the more positive reviews of Hidalgo often emphasized the universal themes of the film, such as the success of the underdog, compassionate friendship, and heroic perseverance. For example, eminent film critic Roger Ebert struck a more complimentary note when describing Hidalgo as “the kind of movie Hollywood has almost become too jaundiced to make anymore. Bold, exuberant and swashbuckling, it has the purity and simplicity of something Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn might have bounded through.” Here, it seems, Hidalgo was interpreted to be more in tune with successful epic-adventure hybrids of this period, such as The Mummy (1999, dir. Stephen Sommers) or Pirates of the Caribbean (2003, dir. Gore Verbinski), which revived ostensibly outdated topics by mixing action-adventure, horror, and fantasy tropes. According to Yvonne Tasker, these films exemplified “twenty-first century adventure cinema not in its use of a moribund sub-genre but in its commercially smart recycling of familiar cultural forms to appeal to new audiences” (131). The same can be said about Hidalgo, which recycles Western icons such as the mustang, the Colt pistol, and the cowboy, subverting and repurposing them to reach beyond traditional Western audiences. As Mitchell argues with regard to what he calls late Westerns, they “win our admiration not by repeating past performances but by altering and augmenting what has gone before, troping plots self-consciously (ever playfully) in ways that keep us riveted to the screen” (5). As a consequence, Hidalgo offers us a highly self-reflective version of its genre that blends nostalgia with ironic critique.Despite its generic hybridity, Hidalgo draws heavily on Western iconography, which seems to predispose it to a nostalgic look at the past, given that the Western has been described as “one of the most nostalgic of all film genres” because one of its “central plot element[s] . . . involves escape, with the hero retreating from an overly developed and modernized world to the wild, untamed, and celebrated premodern landscapes of the American West” (Kollin 111). Yet I suggest that Hidalgo presents us with what Linda Hutcheon has labeled postmodern nostalgia, one that “does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia's affective power” (255). This is also linked to the idea expressed by Broughton, who suggests that “the Western has become a cult genre in the twenty-first century” (1), with its production driven not by mainstream demand but by filmmakers with a nostalgic passion for this genre. Yet these contemporary Westerns are not simply romantic tributes to a classic genre but are also re-envisioned and creatively altered by their (often auteur) filmmakers. It can be argued that Hidalgo emerged from a similar vein, as the film followed other works by scriptwriter John Fusco exploring Native American culture at the intersection between nostalgia and contemporary realities. His 1992 film Thunderheart (dir. Michael Apted) is set in contemporary America and features Val Kilmer as an FBI agent struggling to accept his Sioux heritage; the 2002 animation Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (dir. Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook) explores the friendship between a spirited mustang and a young Lakota man during the American Indian Wars; and the two-part television production Dreamkeeper (2003, dir. Steve Barron) features a range of Native American myths told by a grandfather to his grandson. All these films explore to a greater or lesser extent the struggles with identity, loss, and modernity that are brought together in Hidalgo.According to Mitchell, “the Western best clarifies how fully genres change yet endure—indeed, how they must change to endure—and solicit our interest by confirming expectations while nonetheless diverging from them, inventively, entertainingly” (3). In order to better understand these changes and the ways in which Hidalgo simultaneously draws on and subverts nostalgic ideas of the American West, it is worth looking briefly at the origins of the genre in nineteenth-century art. Several writers have noted the origins of the cowboy myth in the paintings of American frontier artists, most notably Frederic Remington (see Logan; Bingham). Moreover, Buscombe directly links cinematic representations to Remington (and others), arguing, “‘The West,’ in the form in which we now have it, was essentially a nineteenth-century invention, and we cannot write the history of the cinema's treatment of the subject without taking this into account” (25). This idea that the West and its inhabitants, especially the cowboy, are already a nostalgic ideal appears early on in Hidalgo. When his Wild West Show colleagues put together the money for Hopkins to join the race in Arabia, Annie Oakley (Elizabeth Berridge) tellingly notes, “We're betting on the last American cowboy!” This is significant insofar as the “vanishing cowboy” trope can thus be linked to a more widely discussed idea of vanishing frontiers and Native Americans as “vanishing culture,”6 thus aligning Hopkins even more closely with his mother's ancestry.The mythic idea of the cowboy also closely depends on another of the Western's most iconic characters—the horse. As John S. Nelson suggests, the “archetypal cowboy talks actively and warmly to his horse . . . a western figure of great significance in its own right” (145). Hidalgo's focus on the romantic ideal of rider and faithful horse brings together another trope from nineteenth-century art—namely, the connection between the horse cultures of the Wild West (both cowboy and Native American) and Arabia. As I will discuss in more detail shortly, the character of Hopkins represents both aspects of Wild West horse culture, and it is the latter that in the film provides the closer link to Arab horse culture. While Remington's paintings primarily focused on Western scenes, other orientalist painters of the time emulated Remington's style with explicitly Eastern subjects. Gina MacDermot, managing director of the Mathaf Gallery, London's foremost art gallery on orientalist art, notes that “the subject matter that most easily crosses cultural boundaries is the Arabian horse” (qtd. in De Guise 14). Further, “the Arabian horse became a nostalgic symbol to a Western world rapidly being eclipsed by the Industrial Revolution” and indicated a “yearning for a simpler past” (De Guise 14) that also featured in other Romantic movements of the time. As De Guise suggests, Remington's “cowboy extravaganzas had much in common with Orientalist depictions of Bedouin scenes” (14). Several of the paintings discussed in De Guise's article “Orientalism's Equestrian Eye” can be compared directly to scenes in the film. For example, Georges Washington's The Falconers (date unknown) features men on horseback hunting with falcons, an image represented in the film by Sakr (Adoni Maropis), one of the competitors in the race, and Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting Rider and Dying Horse in the Desert (1872) could almost be considered concept art for a scene toward the end of the film in which Hopkins comforts his collapsed horse in the middle of the desert.As noted, the latter part of Hidalgo especially highlights the similarities between Native American and Bedouin nomadic cultures, a connection that also underlines the notion of the nomadic passage described earlier as one of the key features of contemporary epics. Yet there are more explicit comparisons between the two cultures in the film. For example, when the sheikh's daughter Jazira (Zuleika Robinson) tells Hopkins about her father's love for Wild West stories, she says that “in this Wild West, there are nomads also, the red people. Like the Bedu, they are a horse culture. Have you seen their vanishing kind?” Hopkins answers by revealing, “I am their kind.” This is repeated later in the film when Hopkins's nemesis Prince Bin Al Reeh (Saïd Taghmaoui) scoffs at him, “You will not defeat me. I am born of a great tribe, People of the Horse,” to which Hopkins replies, “So am I.” Rather than drawing on his cowboy credentials, he here refers to his Lakota ancestry. He further reinforces this connection by removing his saddle before mounting his horse, the unsaddled rider having long been an indicator for Native American horsemanship in traditional Western iconography. Yet like the myth of the cowboy, this image is also a construct since “the mounted warrior of the plains—the ubiquitous and romantic symbol of native America—was in fact not an aboriginal character at all but one borne from [a] collision of cultures” (Hine and Faraquer 138). And although the film explicitly links the idea of the nomad to Native American culture, it can similarly be applied to Hopkins as the “last American cowboy,” a mythic character on a journey through an untamed landscape toward an indefinite goal. Consequently, Hidalgo indulges in the images of faithful horses and skillful riders, imbuing them with a nostalgia that emphasizes their status as part of an idealized and mythologized past. As Hutcheon highlights, the past remembered in a nostalgic light “is rarely the past as actually experienced, of course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire” (250), making it as much about our attitudes to the present as the past. Horses are part of this idealized past, both as “emblems of how humans shape realities” (Nelson 338) and as a mythic ideal embodying “freedom, grace and community” (McMahon 336).Numerous scholars of the Western have emphasized more broadly the status of the Western as myth rather than as a fictionalized representation of any historical American West. For example, Will Wright describes the Western as “the transformation of a historical period into a mythical realm” (6), while John White claims that the genre is “a fantasy purporting to contain some truth with relevance for the contemporary world” (36). Others emphasize that the Western genre, “even when it purports ‘realism,’ is often deeply rooted in fantasy” (Johnson et al. 2). Scholars such as Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr have further argued that Western filmmakers blended “mythmaking with a manufactured sense of authenticity” in order to “arrive at larger moral truths” (5). These statements reinforce the earlier point that questions of historical accuracy have less relevance for a film like Hidalgo than do broader moral themes of perseverance, courage, and hope. Moreover, Nelson's suggestion that cinematic Westerns “re-cognize Western truth as always mythic, often spectacular” (254), also highlights the Western genre's connection to the epic with its strong focus on the spectacular and the mythical.In his analysis of classic American film genres, John G. Cawelti shows how the Western (like other genres) has been transformed over time, and a significant element of this transformation has been the “cultivation of nostalgia” (88) and “the use of traditional generic structures as a means of demythologization” (89). As a Western-epic hybrid, Hidalgo has adapted a number of traditional tropes from both genres to create a hybrid form, but it also draws particular attention to the elements of the Western myth through a cultivation of nostalgia in Cawelti's sense. Apart from the suggested connection to orientalist paintings, the film also references nineteenth-century adventure novels and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as the foundational art forms of the Western. As Buscombe notes, “painting, together with popular fiction and commercial spectacles such as the Wild West Show, provided for the cinema an ample repertoire of stock types and narrative situations” (21). Whereas the links to paintings are more implicit, both the Wild West Show, which will be discussed in the next section, and popular fiction are referenced explicitly in the film. For example, Sheikh Riyadh's (Omar Sharif) childlike fascination with cowboy culture largely stems from his readings of so-called dime novels. Incidentally, the casting of Omar Sharif as sheikh can itself be regarded as a nostalgic nod toward his role in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), one of those “bold, exuberant and swashbuckling” old Hollywood movies referred to by Ebert. For Kollin, the sheikh's fascination with these stories and with Hopkins and his Colt pistol “functions as an orientalist cliché, an age-old expression of the West's alleged superiority and power over the East” (111). Here, she cites Egyptian critic Emad El-Din Aysha, who decries the film's apparent “satirizing of all things non-American” (qtd. in Kollin 111). Although Kollin acknowledges that the film's portrayal of the West is more complicated than it looks at first sight, both authors overlook the degree to which the film also satirizes all things American. Rather than being representations of superior technology, Hopkins and his Colt are romantic objects of curiosity for the sheikh, representing an almost extinct species—the subject of fiction rather than history. Nostalgia certainly prevails in the scenes in which the sheikh questions Hopkins about his life in the West and persuades him to wager his Colt, a reminder of the past, not a technology of the future. What we see in Hidalgo is the integration of Western tropes “into a realm of highly creative and self-conscious reverence” (Bandy and Stoehr 8), while the film simultaneously evokes “a sense of warm reassurance by bringing before our mind's eye images from a time when things seemed more secure and full of promise and possibility” (Cawelti 88), which is part of nostalgia's role in the generic transformation. As indicated, throughout the film the nostalgic portrayal of the “Old West” is regularly challenged through ironic commentary, making it indeed a very postmodern form of nostalgia as described by Hutcheon.Apart from nostalgia, demythologization is one of the ways in which, according to Cawelti, classic cinema genres are transformed over time. Hidalgo offers several instances that explicitly challenge the myth, encouraging the audience to reflect on their own perceptions of the Western. The first instance can be found early in the film, when the aforementioned scene at Wounded Knee is instantly juxtaposed with its reenactment in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. We begin hearing the sound of the spectacle while the camera still lingers on Hopkins's distraught face as he witnesses the massacre. We then cut to a drunken Hopkins with smudged makeup watching the grotesque glorification and falsification of the same event. He can barely watch when the proud, elderly Chief Eagle Horn (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman) walks into the arena in order to be abused as the “wild hostile” in the show. As Philip French notes, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show “has become in the western a symbol of the misrepresentation and degradation of the frontier experience” (194), which is clearly evident here. Consequently, this scene also challenges the audience to reflect on the bias inherent in historic representations more broadly, especially in the Western. According to Cawelti, contemporary genre transformations sometimes “deliberately [invoke] the basic characteristics of a traditional genre in order to bring its audience to see that genre as the embodiment of an inadequate and destructive myth” (89). For Hopkins, the show functions as a daily reinforcement of his trauma, just as it confronts audiences with the darker side of American westward expansion and the falsification of the period through contemporary art and fiction. When it is his turn to enter the arena, his colleague Annie Oakley reminds him, “Remember, you're the good guy.” This ironic reminder also suggests that it is no longer self-evident that the hero is just that. Connoisseurs of the genre might also see parallels here to John Ford's iconic Fort Apache (1948), which in its final scene shows how through “the romance of a Remington-style painting . . . the myth of heroic leadership is re-endorsed with no small trace of irony after its exposure as fallacious” in the preceding events (Carter 144).Another instance of the film's ironic reframing of central themes of Western mythology is the idea of justice. French criticizes Hidalgo for “simultaneously [expressing] disgust at the treatment of Native Americans on the frontier, and yet [demonstrating] Yankee know-how to their [Bedouin] hosts” (193). However, some of the scenes in which Hopkins demonstrates his “Yankee know-how” also can be read as a parody on traditional Western tropes that are morally deeply ambiguous. For example, in one scene the sheikh questions his aide Aziz about the latter's involvement in the abduction of his daughter. The sheikh appeals to Aziz's honor and decides to trust the man's word when Aziz denies any involvement. At this point Hopkins brutally intervenes, ties Aziz to his horse, and puts his spurs on Aziz's throat until he gives in and confesses. Hopkins's laconic remark that this is “Western justice” leaves more than just a little aftertaste. Although he proves more effective in extracting a confession, the sheikh's appeal to honor arguably demonstrates higher moral values than Hopkins's brutality. While Hidalgo may be more family-friendly fare due to its crossover with epic and adventure films, it nevertheless shares a certain moral cynicism with more serious revisionist Westerns of the period.7 According to Gilles Deleuze, the decline of traditional genres in modern cinema is marked by, among other things, calling into question the ideas of judgment, the “consciousness of clichés” (214), and a hero that is no longer heroic in a traditional sense (171). All these eleme