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After the midnight screening of The
Burrowers, director J.T. Petty (S&Man) told us one of
the things he liked about the movie was that the John Wayne character
doesn't save everyone. It's up to the “immigrants and the Black
people”(and the Lakota and the Ute).
I like that, too. (And Coffey the protagonist's bowler hat felt like a little fuck you to the drowning, snakebit Irish in Lonesome Dove)
The
film's been compared to The Searchers,
a film about an ex-Confederate soldier leading a party to recover a
woman from the Comanche, a woman who it turns out is happy where she
is. The soldier is played by John Wayne, who gives a lot of depth to
a racist and increasingly unreliable character. But The
Burrowers presentation of
racism, prejudice, blindness and cruelty hits me harder. I remember
having a similar response to Ravenous,
a movie as much about Manifest Destiny as it was about cannibalism.
The white man's burden becomes the burden of eating other people. In
a contemporary setting, Ravenous
would probably come off as a criticism of consumption, maybe just
another twist on a zombie movie.
The Burrowers
and Ravenous hit me
hard because horror and Westerns have some common elements.
J.T. Petty himself mentioned that he finds the Old West terrifying,
the chaos, the violence, the isolation. It makes a good ground.
Westerns and horror are also usually morality tales. Both are often
criticized for working with simplistic moral systems. But there's
nothing simple about morality in The Burrowers.
Everything is ambiguous and the horror elements (monsters!) might
help deepen allegory without making it annoyingly apparent.
The Burrowers seems
at the same time more desolate and forgiving than a film like The
Searchers. I like that
it's clear that the young Lakota man trying to pull his wounded
friend out of Coffey and his friends' line of fire clearly feels
exactly what Coffey and his friends do. Their fears reflect and amplify
each others', driving them to kill as well as to try to talk. It's
apparent in the film that everyone short of Clancy Brown's Clay kills
out of terror and panic. Well, all except one hateful character. I
like that in a seemingly misanthropic film behind all the cruelty and
blinding prejudice, the terror and inability to communicate, there is
still a desire to communicate and even friendship. It might not be
enough to save everyone, but it's something.
John Wayne can't save any of us. It's
up to us. Is there much more terrifying than that?
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