The Outlaw-Knight: Law's Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , and The Dark Knight Rises

The SpokesmanDorothy M. Johnson's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and Infinite Reference Daryl W. Palmer (bio) From Buffalo Bill to John Wayne to George W. Bush, men have swaggered theatrically while claiming to speak for the Americas. Although their messages differ in many particulars, these men find their popular support by appealing to their audience's identification with the Old West. Masters of the utterance, they may be angling for power or money or fame, but they always claim to speak the simple truth and back up their talk with the threat of violence. They often (to appropriate a bit of contemporary slang useful for its suggestion of slipperiness) come off as cowboys. As a rule, people either worship or despise these bold men while never bothering to scrutinize their place in larger systems of American signification. When the spokesman becomes serious, he forestalls scrutiny by appearing so plainspoken. Hiding nothing, the spokesman speaks for someone or some thing. A border-walker between speech and writing, he never warrants linguistic scrutiny. No mere reporter, the spokesman quotes but rarely cites. He frequently speaks for the absent, or the silent. Indeed, their words have already become his words, and he openly assumes the authority to carry on his work, which engenders (he claims) a host of benefits such as order, protection, fame, and justice. Perhaps it goes without saying that a genealogy of the spokesman in the Americas has yet to be written. The present essay aims to commence this labor by scrutinizing the way men claim to speak for the North American West in a circuit of texts inspired by Dorothy M. Johnson's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."1 There are many reasons why no one seems to pay critical attention to the spokesman, the most obvious being his sagebrush context, a region that has always inspired people to abstain from scrupulous analysis. With all the profundity of myth, Willa Cather captures this culture in My Antonia as Jim Burden remembers his arrival on the Great Plains: "The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out."2 Under this erasure, a culture of restraint emerges. Gretel Ehrlich describes the evolving mode of expression: "People hold back their thoughts in what seems to be dumbfounded silence, then erupt with an excoriating perceptive remark."3 Famous for his wise reflections on the West, Wallace Stegner describes twin poles of thinking and throbbing, the latter referring to the Westerner's celebration of experience without thought: "the largeness and clarity take the scales from my eyes, and I respond as unthinkingly as a salmon that swims past a river-mouth and tastes the waters of its birth."4 In this way, way out west, context is everything as it awaits our simple response. Striding into the center of Main Street in this large land, the spokesman offers spectacle that further reinforces the passivity of his audience. Stirring up the plebeian masses while stomping his alligator boots, our hero waves his sixshooter and ten gallon Stetson. Mention of this scene probably ought to conjure up images of Wild West Shows where Buffalo Bill presided over the antics of Annie Oakley, who once shot a cigarette out of Kaiser Wilhelm's mouth. On this stage, a kaiser stands in for history in order to heighten suspense and underwrite the audience's sense that the past was never more than spectacle. Floating in a bubble we call the Old West, these shows always seem detached from South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, even from the metropolitan experience of North America. That said, should anyone want to question the matter more rigorously, it will always be possible to find authorities who assure us that the spokesman's context for utterance is real, plain and simple. In How to Do Things With Words (1962), J. L. Austin took pains to urge this model of communication by identifying the conditions of its success: Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are...

John Ford's 1962 classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, analyzes the difficulties inherent in founding a new political order based on the rule of law. Some critics have concluded that the film mordantly portrays the closing of the frontier, the tragic loss of the rugged individualism it promoted (represented by Tom Doniphon), and the ascendance in its place of a fraudulent political class (represented by Ransom Stoddard), while exposing that even free societies are founded on crime. Yet, as others have argued, Doniphon also represents the spirited part of the Platonic tripartite soul, revealing spiritedness's ambiguous relation to justice: he refuses to fight unless personally threatened; perpetuates servitude, if not slavery; and shows no interest in promoting equality of women. Doniphon stands in opposition to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, pointedly recited at the film's chronological center, and his eclipse by Stoddard is not a tragic mistake. In addition, John Locke's state of nature teaching unlocks why Valance's death is not a crime that sullies the foundations of the society. Finally, the legend told as fact at the film's conclusion combines both men into a single entity, “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” thereby propagating a salutary lesson for future citizens: reason must combine with and rule over spiritedness if law and order are to prevail.

John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is widely regarded as one of his best and darkest films and as a deep meditation on the American foundation myth. This article examines issues raised by John Ford’s film through distinctions Hannah Arendt developed between ‘power’ and ‘violence’ in her 1969 essay “On Violence” and through her analysis of foundation myths in her 1963 book On Revolution and places them in a broader context of political philosophy. Through this conceptual apparatus, we may gain new insight into the way John Ford’s film grapples with issues of law and politics. Moreover, the film provides concrete illustrations of some of the more abstract concepts in Hannah Arendt’s writings.

In this article, I combine political philosophy and film to examine the problematic of the ‘mystical’ foundation of authority and democracy as represented in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . Ford’s filmic vision is interpretable as a parable of the passage from the state of nature to the modern republic and the deconstruction of American democratic progressivism. To analyse it, I proceed in two steps: first, I defend a middle-way critical Enlightenment perspective between the democratic-progressivist and the deconstructive approach to the question of foundations. Second, in dialogue with this critical Enlightenment perspective, I argue that Ford’s cinematic vision of the foundation remains ambivalent, given that its deconstruction of the mythology of American democratic progressivism is premised on the nostalgic mythologizing of the pre-democratic age. Moreover, I take issue with Robert Pippin’s interpretation of the movie as a cautionary tale against Enlightenment rationalism, and which poses at its center the key psychological role of myths in politics (2011). In contrast, I argue that Ford’s cinematic vision cautions against decoupling the socio-political and personal life from the vital connection to truth and acting upon truth. From this standpoint, a “politics of truth” is, against Pippin’s interpretation of Ford’s vision, compatible with taking into account the constitutive role of narratives in building political legitimacy and authority.

In Print the Legend: Politics, Culture, and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford, a collection of writers explore Ford's view of politics, popular culture, and civic virtue in some of his best films: Drums Along the Mohawk, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach, How Green Was My Valley, and The Last Hurrah. John Ford, more than most motion picture directors, invites his viewers into a serious discussion of these themes. For instance, one can consider Plato's timeless question 'What is justice?' in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, vengeance as classical Greek tragedy in The Searchers, or ethnic politics in The Last Hurrah. Ford's films never grow stale or seem dated because he continually probes the most important questions of our civic culture: what must we do to survive, prosper, pursue happiness, and retain our common decency as a regime? Further, viewing them from a distance of time, we are subtly invited to ask whether anything has been lost or gained since Ford celebrated the civic virtues of an earlier America. Is Ford's America an idealized America or a lost America?

The eternal conflict between justice and violence is the theme of director John Ford's last great film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the world of the American West where Ford's story is set, justice does not just happen; it is a work of manly courage that encompasses a willingness—in extreme cases—to kill those men, such as Liberty Valance, who challenge law and order. Justice will require, as Plato said, a rightly ordered soul, but it will be a soul that must do violence to realize justice in a world that too often resembles a Hobbesian state of nature. In Ford's view, the truth of these violent origins of justice are more likely to be obscured than illuminated by the civilized historian's account of this truth. And we do violence not merely to justice but also to truth itself if we fail to respect the hard reality that civilization requires such measures.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction 1. Diverse Perspectives in Silent Westerns: Landscape, Morality, and the Native American 2. Not at Home on the Range: Women against the Frontier in The Wind 3. He Went That-Away: The Comic Western and Ruggles of Red Gap 4. Landscape and Standard-Setting in the 1930s Western: The Big Trail and Stagecoach 5. Indian- Fighting, Nation-Building, and Homesteading in the A-Western: Northwest Passage and The Westerner 6. Howard Hawks and John Wayne: Red River and El Dorado 7. The Postwar Psychological Western (1946-- 1956): My Darling Clementine to Jubal 8. John Ford's Later Masterpieces: The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 9. The Existential and Revisionist Western: Comanche Station to The Wild Bunch and Beyond 10. Eastwood and the American Western: High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven 11. Coda: From Lonesome Dove (1989) to Cowboys and Aliens (2011) Notes Bibliography Index

Examinations of masculinity in John Ford's film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) tend to revolve around the two leading male protagonists played by John Wayne and James Stewart (Tom Doniphon and Ransom Stoddard, respectively), as evidenced by Martin Scorsese's comment in the American Masters retrospective profile, "John Ford and John Wayne: Pappy and the Duke" (2006): "What's great about the picture, for me, is—what defines a man? Is it Stewart or is it Wayne? Actually it's both, in a way." The film's title invites an interpretive pairing of the characters Tom and Ranse: one, the man who actually kills the outlaw Valance; and the other, the man who becomes known and respected for killing Valance. I argue that this critical pairing is a valuable but incomplete consideration of masculinity in the film because it ignores Woody Strode's portrayal of Pompey, a black character who plays a particularly integral role in the act of shooting Valance. Ford repeatedly presents Pompey negotiating race and place, resonating significantly with the civil rights movement that is contemporary with the film's release. Pompey's character draws attention to racial injustices in a film that also prompts the viewer to question triumphant American stories of settling the West.

In the American cultural imagination, the Wild West is a mythic-historical place where our nation’s values and ideologies were formed. The heroes of this dangerous world, most familiar to us through film, are men of violence who fight the bad guys as they build the foundations of civilization out of wilderness, forging notions of justice, manhood, and honor in the process. In the Greco-Roman societies that are America’s cultural ancestors, epics provided similar narratives: like Western film, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid focus on the mythic-historical past and its warriors, men who helped shape the ideological frameworks of their respective civilizations. At the same time, the best works from both genres are far from simplistic, but instead, call the assumptions underlying society’s core beliefs and value systems into question even as they promote them. Cowboy Classics examines the connections between these seemingly disparate yet closely related genres by first establishing the broad generic parallels and then providing deeper analysis through case-studies of five critically acclaimed Golden Age Westerns: Howard Hawks’s Red River, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, George Stevens’s Shane, and John Ford’s The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the end, this important comparison allows the American Western to serve as a lens through which to better understand the more remote works of antiquity, while identifying epic patterns in film provides the distance that allows us to see Westerns, in whose ideological undercurrents we are more directly implicated, in a more objective light.

Musical Links in "Young Mr. Lincoln, My Darling Clementine", and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"

T h e F il m m a k e r a s L o n e R id e r : J a m e s B e n n in g ’s “W e s t e r n s ” S c o t t Ma c D o n a l d By the 1950s, the family automobile and the national highway sys­ tem were making the West simultaneously more accessible and less imaginatively potent for Americans, and during the following decades, the fading mystique was reflected in the popularity of the films about the demise of the Old West, both historically and mythically. While some films focused on the last Western heroes— The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)— others, like Little Big Man (1970) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), debunked the traditional Western myths. In more recent decades the popular appeal of the traditional Western has dissipated, and we are left with relatively infrequent instances of nos­ talgia for the genre— Dances with Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992), most notably— and with films focusing on protagonists who emulate, or at least echo, traditional Western heroes from within contemporary life: Easy Rider (1969), The Electric Horseman (1979), Thelma and Louise (1991), Natural Bom Killers (1994), Lone Star (1996), to name a few. One of the ironies of Western film history is that with few exceptions S c o t t Ma c D o n a l d 2 9 9 the sense of mythic place so important to nineteenth-century landscape painters of the West, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century photogra­ phers, as well as to the maturation of the Western in the films of John Ford, from Stagecoach (1939) through The Searchers (1956), seems to have disappeared despite the fact that the actual geographic spaces of the West remain visually compelling—all the more compelling, one might argue, as they are increasingly environmentally endangered. Obviously, advertisers have continued to use spaces familiar from the Western— Monument Valley, most obviously— to market products, but few com­ mercial directors seem interested in honoring the magnificence of the West, the way Ford regularly did. In fact, in modem American film history, the most interesting evo­ cations/explorations of western spaces have tended to come not from Hollywood, but from the independent cinema and especially from what is generally termed avant-garde film. While the commercial cinema has privileged characters over place, filmmakers working outside the indus­ try have at times used their freedom from commercial necessity to look beyond melodrama and to focus on western spaces in all of their geo­ graphic and historical complexity. Landmarks in this more fully placecentered type of Western include Bruce Baillie’s To Parcifal (1966), in which the filmmaker imagines himself a knight-errant witnessing the intersection of the original landscape of northern California and the forces of development epitomized by the railroad and the lumbering industry; Robert Nelson’s Suite California Stops and Passes: Parts 1 and 2 (1976, 1978), in which Nelson explores and compares southern California (Part 1) and northern California (Part 2); Babette Mangolte’s The Sky on Location (1983), for which the filmmaker drove 20,000 miles in an attempt to evoke a sense of the western American landscape akin to what the earliest European and European American explorers and settlers might have experienced as they traversed the landscapes of the West for the first time; and Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation series, especially #2: Mesa Verde (1989) and #4: D. H. Lawrence (1990), expressionist evocations of Brakhage’s consciousness as he travels the Southwest. Perhaps the most impressive recent exploration of the West is the series of feature films made by James Benning during the 1990s: North on Evers (1991), Deseret (1995), Four Comers (1997), and Utopia (1999). While Benning has been a fixture of the American avant-garde for twenty years, his “Westerns” are virtually unknown outside of film stud­ ies despite their considerable relevance and pedagogical value for teachers and scholars in other fields, especially American studies and 3 0 0 WAL 3 5 . 3 F A L L 2 0...

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance tells the familiar story of the struggle in the American West between naked physical violence and the rule of law. It appears that law wins when the thuggish Valance is bested in a shootout by the bookish Rance Stoddard, who then goes on to be the Governor and Senator of a state he helps civilize. But a flashback scene (within a flashback scene) reveals that the fight was not fair and was orchestrated from the shadows by a hidden gunman. The triumph of law and order has been effected by the very force law is designed to blunt. Civilization rests on a bedrock not of principle but of cold-blooded murder. High Noon presents a vision of the law housed not in an institution but in the breast of a single, heroically unheroic man who stands his ground independently of any official obligation to do so. At the moment of crisis, he is deserted by everyone—including, for a time, his new wife—and must rely only on his determination to be the man that he is, with or without a badge.

In director John Ford’s 1962 Western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, U.S. Senator ansom Stoddard, played by James Stewart, reveals to a newspaper editor that his long and illustrious career has been built upon a lie—that he was not the man who shot a vicious outlaw, Liberty Valance. Instead, it was Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne, who actually killed, or rather assassinated, Valance with a rifle-shot fired from the concealment of a dark alleyway. “Cold-blooded murder,” Doniphon tells Stoddard, “but I can live with it.” At the conclusion of Stoddard’s tale, the editor explains that he won’t use the story. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”1KeywordsSchool ShootingNewspaper EditorCustomer ReviewLarge NarrativeSpiritual EventThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Notes OLD GUNFIGHTERS, NEW COPS Throughout the decade of the 1950s the three major television networks presented twenty or thirty Westerns each week, and feature-length western films were produced every year. That heyday has passed, and most people assume that, though novels with a setting in western history will continue to be produced, the screen Western is virtually dead. Or is it? The hypothesis to be developed in what follows is that the alleg­ edly wise men of the networks are still giving us Westerns—with a difference. Today’s Western is the “cop show.” The subject of the classic Western was the impact of the East upon the West and of the West upon Easterners. The terms were set early in The Virginian (1902), in which Owen Wister’s subject was the process by which the barbarism of the frontier was subdued by eastern civilization. In the films based upon this model the institutions of civilization—church, school, mar­ riage, family—were always threatened by the barbarism of the frontier, embodied in earlier, primitive versions of the myth in the Indian, or, later, and more meaningfully, in the outlaw or the unscrupulous rancher. Those represen­ tations of the effete East who entered this world were either too helpless (the schoolmarm, the minister) or too incompetent (the drunken doctor or the young lawyer played by James Stewart in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”) to subdue this barbarism. But civilization and the redemption of society were made possible by the gunfighter, who was somehow caught up in this crisis, risked his life in conflict with the forces of barbarism, and, defeating them, made possible the triumph of the institutions of civilization, in the process creating a society in which he could not live because of his own extralegal methods. Examples of this plot are obvious. In the flowering of the post-war screen Western, we had “The Gunfighter” (1950) and “High Noon” (1952), though both were inexact versions of the myth;Johnny Ringo had to die to restore the moral order and Will Kane rode away from the town he saved with the con­ tempt its people deserved. But John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956) showed the perfect end of the gunfighter-redeemer: he restores the lost child to her family, and they enter the house through the door of which we seeJohn Wayne walk away toward the desert which is the gunfighter’s only home. And in George Stevens’ “Shane” (1953) we had the myth in its purity. In the autumn of the genre there were “Hombre” and “Will Penny” (both 1967), and “True Grit” (1969), in all of which we could see at least a 132 Western American Literature partial breakdown of the myth. The three gunfighters were redeemers, but John Russell, the “hombre,” died to save people who were hardly worth sav­ ing; Will Penny rode away only because he thought he was too old for mar­ riage and family; and though John Wayne assured us at the end of “True Grit” that he still had what it takes, the sequel (“Rooster Cogburn”) suggested that what he had was not enough. But before we reached that point we had in Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” (1962) a great film which presented the myth in clear though autumnal purity. Here the forces of civilization had triumphed with banks and automobiles, thanks to the efforts of men like Steve Judd, but the mining camp to which Judd and his apparently unscrupulous friend Gil Westrum rode was the last pocket of barbarism. In going to the camp and destroying the Hammond brothers, Judd and Westrum saved the innocent girl and Judd, dying, became a model for the future behavior of Westrum and the innocent “kid,” Hec Longtree. In a recent note, Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler have noted similari­ ties between “Shane” and the recent Peter Weir film “Witness” (WAL 20, November 1985, 253-254). They are correct in this observation because the modern cops-and-crooks genre is modelled, consciously or not, on the classic Western and all manifestations of it, to one degree or another, resemble the models. The cop-show’s true subject is...

IntroductionThe American Western, a popular film genre from earliest days of cinema well into 1960s, has been linked to story of America more insistently than any other genre. Set in American West, that most mythic of spaces, conventional wisdom has these films embodying the spirit, struggle and demise of new (American Film Institute) even as concepts of American spirit and of frontier are taken for granted and thus seemingly self-evident. This article is a revisitation of so-called Golden Age of Western2-roughly 1946 to 1962-a period in which moviegoing3 as well as production of Westerns peaked,4 with both dropping offf precipitously by 1960s. This Golden Age coincided with major social and cultural shifts in United States, and this project takes particular convergences of history in America in postwar period as significant influences nature and reception of Western. It integrates cultural events and phenomena of 1950s in America with an understanding of ways in which Western shaped and appealed to popular imagination in order to better understand how Westerns made sense in post-World War II period. The ubiquity of Western during this time and its normalized rendering of a very particular narrative of America that was projected onto a mythic interpellated viewers into a contemporary consumerist ideology while developing a Western version of Family Romance that was consistent with economic, social, and political goals of configuring nuclear family as bulwark against insecurities of age. The Westerns of 1950s, in their representation of American story and values provided model for how to be an American, which, in 1950s, was to be a consumer for whom market was final frontier.The West of Imagination-History and Myth in WesternThis is West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print legend.-The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, dir. 1962)The Western emerges out of nexus of signifying practices that has come to be called Myth of West. This West of imagination has, since time of Columbus, been integral to story of America, proving a natural image to reality (Barthes 142). That is, west and events and people in it have, through process of mythologization, been emptied of their specific historicity and refilled with meaning-resignified-to appear as if natural. In Western, this naturalization is overdetermined: filmed on location (even if simulated in studio), landscape registers immediately as West, and locates that meaning in nature.5 Scholars of Western are beholden to this Barthesian logic: 1950s Westerns transform history into a species of narrative which we know to be fiction, but which we nevertheless take to have some important element of truth (Cortese 124). Myths are stories drawn from a society's history that have acquired through persistent usage power of symbolizing that society's ideology . . . their identification with venerable tradition makes them appear to be products of 'nature' rather than history-expressions of a trans-historical consciousness (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation 5-6). This dehistoricization pertains to narrative level-the mythic-in contrast to background, which has often been characterized as historically accurate. But in film, every aspect of mise-en-scene is intentional. The apparent attention to historical detail is an authenticating gesture, itself a fiction that provides ground, unquestioned routine of insistently recurring that audience apprehends to be that which anchors storyline to a historical context. Throughout, history maintains some kind of ontological reality, with events in retrievable in some unmediated form: one of things which distinguishes bourgeois myth from history is [the] silent and continuous intrusion of present into what ought to be an inviolable past (Cortese 124). …