Films Closing Off of the American West

Now that the West has been closed off for a good long time, it is only right that we face a simple fact. Namely, that the frontier just wasn't good for much. Once the land had been developed and its riches plundered, the West became a place like everywhere else-a place for people to go crazy and kill each other.

How should we conceive of that great legend known as the West? I'd say think of a daisy chain of cowboys and Indians, Charlie Mansons and Sharon Tates, Scott Fitzgeralds and Marilyn Monroes.

The wild, wild West: Just another great American place to die!

II

Even the movie business, the last dream industry left in the West, is dying now. The studios are going bankrupt and westerns are sooner made in Spain than in Montiment Valley. Still, as Hollywood sinks into the sea, a last western has emerged. It is Arthur Penn's new film, Little Big Man, and it was not only shot in real live North America but uses real Indians to play the roles of Indians. This is strange. Stranger yet is the fact that this western opens and closes in an old-age home.

III

The man in the old-age home is Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman). He is 121 years old and the sole white survivor of the rout of Little Big Horn, (Or is he?)

Jack Crabb is 121 years old and knew Wild Bill Hickok, General George Armstrong Custer, and Old Lodge Skins, Cheyenne chieftain. (Or did he?)

He was raised by the Cheyennes, who call themselves "human beings" and who rewarded his early heroism by bestowing upon him the name Little Big Man. (Or did they?)

Later he became a white man again Later still an Indian. Later still a white man once more.

Or is Jack Crabb the biggest liar who ever lived?

IV

Quite a life it is that Jack Crabb claims for himself as he talks to a journalist from the bed of his old-age home, where, still, he lives and remembers.

At one point or another, Jack had a white wife and an Indian wife, worked as a huckster of phony patent medicines, was a famous gunslinger, a Cheyenne hero, a scout for Gen. Custer, a drunk, a hermit, a pious churchgoer, a great lover, a mule-skinner, a shopowner. He also toyed with suicide.

Or is Jack Crabb just a senile old man, full of shit?

Does it make any difference?

V

In the end it is always very late, very cold and very dark. It is four in the morning, your logical processes are spent, your mind is wandering around like a vacuum cleaner picking up tiny balls of lint. Everything is inescapable. Every few seconds your brain hinges on some different nugget from the past. You would like to forget each and every one of them, but the pictures are too sharp and too terrifying to ignore. You are at once too tired and too aware to edit or sentimentalize your memory's scrapbook.

And so your face things clearly. From your earliest childhood, you remember falling off a two-wheeler and getting three stitches in your thigh. From your education, you remember throwing up during the smoking break of a final exam. From your summer in Europe, you remember fighting viciously with someone you like about the quickest subway route to the Cinematheque. From your beautiful year-long romance, you remember only your lover standing before you, her eyes tearing, her hand spread open to reveal dozens of tiny red sleeping capsules. From the newspapers, you remember only the killing, the killing, the killing.

This is the way things are in the middle of the night, and this, I more and more believe, is the way things truly are. Only the stoned moments allow you the luxury of lying to yourself about life. Then the little pictures fit together to form a coherent story that is funny and grand and only a little sad. But that is not the way it is.

(Or...?)

VI

American history, I have been told, is a coherent story that is funny and grand and only a little sad. Of course that is not really the case. American history may be funny, may sometimes be grand, is more than a little sad-but, make no mistake about it, it is no more coherent than I am. Or you.

(I can no longer put the pictures together. What does the American Civil War have to do with Vietnam? What does Warren G. Harding have to do with Malcolm X? These are only silly technical questions.)

If there is any pattern in the madness of American history it is only the pattern of rape. We raped the Indians, the women, the blacks and the land. Once all that rape had been accomplished, the white men began to rape even other white men.

Hence, The Burning of Los Angeles.

VII

Arthur Penn does not attempt to come up with anything resembling a coherent structure for his Little Big Man. It is a movie full of many little stories. Jack Crabb does many different things during his life (or he does none of them or he does some of them or he dreams them all up), and each thing he does is different from the next. Indeed he tries to take advantage of each and every alternative available to the American frontiersman. Things you or I could do, have done: Make money, go West, get drunk, find God, make love, kill.

But the fact is that though he tries all these things and does most of them well, this is no Horatio Alger story. Because in the end all the Indians are dead and Jack Crabb is going to die in an old-age home, surrounded by plastic and human garbage.

VIII

Incidents of the closing off of the West:

1. The New York Times termed the national television audience for the latest moonwalk "disappointing."

2. Old people, the Nixon administration and the media seem more truly interested in ecology than anyone else.

3. The Op-Ed Page of the New York Times.

4. The perfection of color television.

5. The film industry's failure to offer Charles Manson a contract.

6. The arrival of "Future Shock."

7. The arrival of "Future Schlock" (see New York, January 25).

8. The Greening of America.

9. The Merv Griffin Show.

10. Joan Didion's novel, Play It As It Lays, in which the heroine opts out of suicide for daily drives up and down the California freeways.

11. The end of full employment.

12. The failure of the 747s.

13. The selection of Derek Bok (Beverly Hills, Stanford) as President of (Eastern) Harvard.

14. Everything that pertains to Orange County.

15. "The Dry Look" from Gillette.

(Or are we all going to the moon?)

IX

And there you are. Bankruptcy is the order of the day, and there will shortly be Zum Zums in Laos (More Restaurant Associates Great Places).

Jack Crabb's experience (real or not) is the American experience (real or not) is our experience (real or not).

(Or does it make any difference?)

There are several things to be done if you passionately want the pieces to fit together again-or, even more, if you want ultimately to trade the pieces in for something besides a bed in an old-age home. But far be it for me to tell you what those things-to-be-done are. I have to write a thesis as it is, and anyway, I'm not quite sure what I would say.

Except maybe: Try to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

X

And finally. There is an intensely passionate moment near the end of Little Big Man. The very old Old Lodge Skins has lived to see his race perish as the white man under the leadership of General Custer has closed off the West. The old chief knows that's the ball game because while "there's an endless supply of white men, there's always been a limited supply of human beings."

The chief is full of despair. He knows that the Cheyennes, the human beings, will "soon walk a road that leads nowhere," and from then on things will go only further downhill, for "a world without human beings has no center to it."

So Old Lodge Skins prepares to die. He takes his adopted white grandson Jack up into the hills to be a witness to his death. Up into the hills go the old man and the young as the sky grows darker. Having reached a clearing, Old Lodge Skins does a farewell dance to the gray sky. He finishes. He lies down. Just before he shuts his eyes for his final slumber, he speaks once more to God. "Take care of my son here," he says. "See that he doesn't go crazy."

It doesn't work out as he planned. Old Lodge Skins does not die that day. And Jack Crabb lives on to go crazy. And so, Jesus Christ, do we all.