"LOST"

Ten Years, Ten Films: Revisiting 2010

We can broadly define the two predominant trends in the western genre as the traditional western, in which the cowboy is largely presented as a hero (think John Wayne), and the deconstructionist western, in which the cowboy is largely presented as an antihero (think Clint Eastwood). I'm fundamentally skeptical of these definitions, for the record—I think so-called "traditional" westerns are more critical of the cowboy's heroism than most people assume—but in Meek's Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt completely eschews both of these trends and depicts the cowboy not as a hero or an antihero, but as just another regular human being.

This decentering provides a much more radical critique than even the deconstructionist westerns claimed to, and by doing so it also critiques those genre traditions themselves. If traditional westerns mythologized cowboys by presenting them as larger-than-life almost-superheroes—a framing which is only too obviously problematic for its celebration of violence against indigenous cultures, of toxic masculine stereotypes, and of objectification and sexualized violence toward women—the deconstructionist western flips this image on its head, emphasizing these problematic elements and casting the cowboy as a villain.

Kelly Reichardt's vision of the American West cuts right through this false dichotomy and reveals the way both of these formulations are still mythologizing the figure of the cowboy, merely in different directions. Both of these genre traditions are still raising the cowboy up on a pedestal: sure, the deconstructionist cowboy is a violent sociopath, but he's an important violent sociopath, a significant character precisely because of his violence, one who blazed trails even if those blazes took down a few people with them. The deconstructionist cowboy is still a mythical figure, even if a negative one.

The first step in Reichardt's demythologizing of the West is her landscapes: instead of epic, towering Fordian mountains, we get completely flat terrain with no noticeable landmarks whatsoever. The emphasis throughout Meek's Cutoff is on the mundanity of everyday life and the aimlessness of the journey westward, and this featureless terrain foregrounds that thematic focus. The plot-defining moments of the narrative are all purposefully routine and ordinary: fixing a squeaky wheel, replacing a broken axle, mending a torn shoe. The group finds gold, but even this discovery becomes unremarkable. The gold won't feed them, and it won't replenish their diminishing supply of water.

Even the staging of the caravan's journey reflects the purposeless lack of direction of the journey westward, undercutting the supposed higher purpose of manifest destiny. Sometimes they travel screen-right to screen-left, sometimes screen-left to screen-right, as if even visually they're lost. But Reichardt's primary symbol of the mundanity of the West is Mr. Meek himself, the cowboy who doesn't even know where he's going. If John Wayne is the "Good Guy" and Clint Eastwood is the "Bad Guy," Stephen Meek is just "A Guy." It's right there in his name: he's literally defined as "Meek," as "not violent or strong : MODERATE."

Nobody in the caravan trusts his leadership, to the point that they would rather follow the guidance of a native whose language they don't speak and whose intentions they don't know. Threatened by the native man's power over their group, however, Mrs. Tetherow invokes the supposedly great civilization they've established: "If only you could imagine what we've done, the cities we've built." She appeals to the settlers' social development and industrialization, but these purported achievements do nothing to help them out here in the wilderness. Where both the traditional and deconstructionist westerns depict the from the "savage" frontier to "civilized" society, here it's the frontier that wins out in the end.

Meek pretends to understand this land and the people who inhabit it, but as the film progresses we begin to see that this is all a front, a pretense to wisdom. This is our symbol of manifest destiny: an impostor, a man who has no idea what he's doing or where he's going, a guide who gets his charges increasingly lost in the American wasteland. This cowboy is not strong, like John Wayne, and he's not violent, like Clint Eastwood. He's somewhere in the middle, just an average Joe, trying to survive in this foreign landscape without dying of hunger or dehydration. No myth, only humanity. LOST.

Favorites from My Favorite Directors
2010 | Kelly Reichardt | Westerns