I keep prayingfor a double billofBad Day at Black RockandVera CruzMotel Chronicles
“Cowboy my eyeball. He’s a useless twerp. We shoulda canned him right from the start.”
The Mad Dog Blues
At the beginning of Vera Cruz, Gary Cooper appears riding slowly from the distance, a speck against the vast Mexican desert landscape. When Wim Wenders’s film from Sam Shepard’s screenplay of Paris, Texas begins, we see Harry Dean Stanton dressed in an old business suit with a baseball cap on his head trudging aimlessly through the eerily white Mojave Desert. The landscape looks as if it is covered in post-apocalyptic ash. Much of the resonance of this moment of anomie comes from the echo of the classic opening of the Western – the lone hero riding out of the wilderness for a brief foray into society to perform a saving act. Shepard’s Travis will also perform such an act but, like the world in which it takes place, now more a spiritual than physical wilderness, the act will be morally ambiguous.
While much has been written about the Western hero and Shepard’s own persona as actor and public figure and about the role of the cowboy in his early works, I want to focus here on echoes of the classic Westerns Shepard grew up with in the family sagas he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. It is in the echoes of the Western hero in Shepard’s work that we see most vividly what the contemporary American male has lost, a loss connected again and again to the terrifying or ineffectual patriarchal wanderer always associated with the desert.
I want to suggest that Shepard’s feckless fathers are failures because the dream of the West, as depicted in Westerns, is dead. The conflict between the natural man and the social man continues to be played out in their crippled sons. Critics have noted the autobiographical aspects of Shepard’s work, the way his own father circulates through a number of the plays, a man who himself embodies the split between domesticity and waywardness. As Shepard succinctly put it: “My Dad lives alone in the desert. He says he doesn’t fit in with people.”1 I am interested more in the ideals of masculinity that circulated through American culture and that intersect with Shepard’s own life to create his Western family sagas.
When David Savran discusses Sam Shepard at length in his intriguing study Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture, he both links Shepard to the cowboy mystique and ignores its centrality in Shepard’s work. Savran notes that: “Shepard’s men are almost invariably locked into a system of intense competition less for power, glory, and the girl than for the distinction of being the toughest, most ornery, most angst-ridden, most rugged individual in the (true) West.”2 However, Savran is more interested in the “reflexive sado-masochism” he finds as the pattern of male relations in Shepard’s plays than in Shepard’s deep personal and artistic commitment to the mystique of the Western and its heroes, which is at the heart of his mature work. In his earlier book, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Savran dismisses the Western hero as a model of political incorrectness: “In many respects, the cowboy most clearly exemplifies the hegemonic masculinity of the late 1940s and the 1950s in all its violent contradictions.”3
Nonetheless, to understand Shepard, born in 1943 and raised in the West during the heyday of the Western, one must understand how he used certain basic premises of the Western and its hero, not only in his more abstract earlier work like The Unseen Hand, Cowboy Mouth, The Mad Dog Blues, and The Tooth of Crime, but also in his family sagas, including Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, and True West. As Doris Auerbach writes, “Shepard has used as his paradigm for the family in crisis the overwhelming cultural myth of the American West,”4 one expression of which is the Hollywood Western.
“It sounds a little trite, but there’s not a whole lot of men who know what a man is, and I always thought it weird that American men haven’t resolved this; the American male is in conflict, uniquely in cultures of the West.”5 Gender theorists would tell Shepard that there is no ontological definition of a man. Indeed, the frustration for Shepard’s characters, and perhaps for Shepard himself, comes from seeking a non-existent essential, unified American masculinity. What his characters experience, instead, is division. In her book on the state of the contemporary American male, Stiffed, Susan Faludi writes:
The man controlling his environment is today the prevailing American image of masculinity. A man is expected to prove himself not by being part of society but by being untouched by it, soaring above it. He is to travel unfettered, beyond society’s clutches, alone – making or breaking whatever or whoever crosses his path.
. . . from the nation’s earliest frontier days the man in the community was valued as much as the loner in control, homely society as much as heroic detachment. Even in the most archetypal versions of the original American male myth, a tension prevailed between the vision of a man who stood apart from society and the man who was a part of society; the loner was not the ideal.6
Faludi does not see, as Shepard does, that these contradictory goals can tear an individual male apart, split him into two figures, neither of whom can settle for his half of the ideal. For Shepard, the heart of his 1980 play, True West, is “this conflict between the intellect and the emotions, the physical wild man part and the reasonable, intellectual side. You know, what it really means to be a man.”7 Man’s essence, then, is an irreconcilable split: “I think we’re split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal.”8
At the heart of the psychic split and crisis of masculinity that so interest Shepard is the central situation of American domestic melodrama: a powerful but failed father; an ineffectual but sensual mother; and two brothers in conflict. The central issue of these plays is the inheritance sons receive from a failed patriarchy. Tangential to this is the question of whether the sons’ relationships with women are possible or even important. In Buried Child, Vince tells his girlfriend Shelly, “I’ve gotta carry on the line,”9 but he is not speaking of producing progeny with a woman, but of reconnecting with his dysfunctional family history, particularly a physically and spiritually maimed male lineage, and absorbing it. The sons are compelled to connect with ideals of masculinity for which there are no real models and with myths of the American land that are no longer relevant. One important expression of those ideals was the classic American Western with which Sam Shepard grew up and on which, to some extent, he built his persona.
Sam Shepard’s domestic dramas present impasses. They end in inertia as men, aware of their incompleteness, violently reunite with their siblings and parents. Violence is the operative term here in families as destructive as any in Greek tragedy. How does a man assert himself in these violent family structures and how does the family isolate him from the rest of American society? Never is this separation more clearly seen than when placed against the Oedipal myth of the classic Western echoed in Shepard’s work.
Shepard’s story, “The Real Gabby Hayes,” presents both a typical picture of the Shepard father-figure and the playwright’s investment in Western movies. The story appears in the collection Cruising Paradise, which also contains two other tales which echo the Western, “Gary Cooper or the Landscape” and “Spencer Tracy is not Dead,” which evokes the Tracy of Bad Day at Black Rock. In the quasi-memoir, “The Real Gabby Hayes,” Shepard remembers his father trying to bond with him in the Mojave Desert. Shepard’s father, like Weston in Curse of the Starving Class, has bought “a small patch of desert”10 from a traveling salesman. The father’s desert dream reflects the tensions between isolation and society central to the Western: “That’s what I had in mind for this place. A little desert hideaway. Can’t always be the family man” (7). For the father, this excursion with the son into the desert was to be a bit of male bonding – confidences and shooting rabbits in their hideaway – but the bonding was another fantasy: “He tried to get friendly with me. I could hear it in his voice. Trying to include me in something as though I were a conspirator. But the more he tried, the further I felt from him” (7). On the way home, Shepard’s father takes him into an exclusive bar where, in a corner booth, Gabby Hayes, who appeared in scores of Westerns, “the subservient gummy-mouthed sidekick, slightly demented and always shy around women” (11), is being fondled by a couple of prostitutes.
In this short memoir, all echoes of the West are of diminution. The desert becomes a tiny tract of land sold by a con man. The alcoholic father dreams of building not a ranch, but a bottle house. Old western myths of treasure lead to a story about a black man being beheaded for leading Spanish explorers not to the Seven Cities of Gold, but to an Indian village that looked gold in the afternoon light: “My Dad walked away, leaving me with the image of decapitation” (9). The remnant of the mythic West isn’t John Wayne or Roy Rogers, but toothless old Gabby Hayes, neither hero nor patriarch. Shepard’s father–son scene is a reduction, even mockery, of the surrogate father’s education provided in Westerns from Shane to The Searchers.
John Ford’s The Searchers (1956, written by Frank S. Nugent), one of the greatest of Western films, provides a paradigm for two crucial family relationships found throughout Shepard’s work; brothers who represent opposing concepts of masculinity and problematic patriarchy. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is both renegade brother and surrogate patriarch. Ethan returns to the Texas homestead of his brother, Aaron, in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War. While Aaron has taken care of his fragile homestead, which stands alone in the middle of hostile territory, Ethan, who has never accepted the Confederate surrender, has been engaging in suspicious activities before his return home. He arrives with bags of newly minted gold he may have stolen. Aaron has a wife and two daughters, though his wife seems to be enamored of Ethan. The first line in the film is “Welcome home, Ethan,” but Ethan is anything but the domestic type. The film traces his four-year journey to find Aaron’s daughter, who was taken away in an Indian raid that slaughtered the rest of the family. At the end of the film, having returned Debbie to a home, Ethan rides off again into the desert. His “good” brother, Aaron, is killed off fifteen minutes into the film. Ethan endures, but the domesticated, feminized society that is building up on the prairie is no place for him.
As brothers Ethan and Aaron Edwards represent a classic masculine split between anarchic spirit connected to the natural world and domesticated, feminized male we will see played out in Shepard’s True West, so Ethan and Martin Pawley are one manifestation of the surrogate father–Oedipal son conflict at the heart of John Wayne movies. After Martin’s parents were killed in an Indian raid, Martin was rescued by Ethan and brought to his brother’s home to be raised. Though Martin, like Ethan, is initially visually associated with the outdoors, he is one of the next generation of men, comfortable in domestic settings but in need of harsh education to face the hostile environment outside the home. Much of The Searchers is Martin’s education through Ethan into Ethan’s world of practical knowledge. Yet Martin, one-eighth Cherokee, must fight Ethan’s racism and his Ahab-like monomaniacal vengeance. Ethan is a tough, unyielding father, a personification of the landscape. Martin will master this world, but also learn to live indoors. At the end, the Oedipal conflict is resolved. Ethan and Martin gain mutual respect and grudging affection, but Ethan rides off leaving Martin in the domestic social space in which he belongs. Ethan’s knowledge is necessary, but not enough.
The Western was a nostalgic genre in which the West was a time as well as a place. Its subtext was that men can only be men in a pre-industrial America where men fight for what they want and believe in. When the cabin door shuts on John Wayne’s Ahab-like Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers, it also shuts on the rough frontier he represented. The future is inside, domesticated, feminized. But something important has been lost. The patriarch is gone. The inside is dark, perilous without that protector. Yet the West of the Western was also a geography; arid, beautiful, yet hostile land. In The Searchers, as in so many classic Westerns, the land itself is a crucial character. Shepard has said:
There are areas like Wyoming, Texas, Montana and places like that, where you really feel this ancient thing about the land. Ancient. That it’s primordial. It has to do with the relationship between the land and the people – between the human being and the ground. I think that’s typically Western and much more attractive than this tight little forest civilization that happened back East. It’s much more physical and emotional to me.11
The patriarch understands and loves the land. He knows as well that human habitation is frail and impermanent against the land and human predators. The family, above all, seems constantly under siege, in need of protection from outsiders like Shane or Ethan Edwards.
By the 1950s, another sub-genre of Western developed, set in the West, but in the postwar, technological era. John Sturges’s classic Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, screenplay by Millard Kaufman) begins with a diesel locomotive roaring across the desert right at the spectator, an invasion of the old West and of the spectator’s space in the theatre. Tracy’s MacReedy alights from the train at a desolate western town where outsiders are clearly not welcome. Dressed in a black business suit, one-armed, white-haired, and avuncular, MacReedy hardly looks like the Western hero able to defeat the sinister-looking bullies who people the town (played by the likes of Lee Marvin). By the end, MacReedy has enlisted the aid of the cowardly old-timers, his contemporaries (played by veterans Walter Brennan and Dean Jagger), but has also played surrogate father and taught young John Ericson the need for courage. In the classic Western, heroes aren’t young men. Gary Cooper was over fifty when he made High Noon and Vera Cruz. John Wayne is decidedly middle-aged in his greatest Westerns. The Western hero may be a case of arrested development in his inability to conform to the norms and institutions of society and conventional heterosexual domestic partnerships, but he is also something of a sage, a remnant of an earlier age with wisdom and knowledge young men still need.
Against the surrogate fathers and heroic, if quixotic loners of the classic Western, Shepard’s fathers, seeking refuge from the strictures of civilization in the desert, are usually absent or destructive; wandering drunks or embittered nihilists (Dodge in Buried Child seems to have walked out of Beckett’s Endgame). While they are nominally progenitors, they are surrounded with images and accusations of impotence. Above all, they seem totally incapable of integrating into civilized society.
These images of failed patriarchy and its relation to a lost West are most vividly seen in Wim Wenders’s film from Shepard’s screenplay, Paris, Texas (1984). Travis Henderson, walking through a white Texas desert as a hawk watches him from a high rock, couldn’t look more out of place, but we discover in the course of the film that he doesn’t fit any better into contemporary American society. Lynda Hart rightly notes:
this anomic scene projects the destiny that we suspect any one of Shepard’s later heroes may succumb to. It is the likely fate of Weston in Curse of the Starving Class; it is the imaginary space out of which Lee emerges and will return in True West: it is a macrocosmic view of the barren garden in Buried Child.12
The desert in Shepard’s work, according to Hart, is “that illusory, eminently male landscape that summons Shepard’s heroes with a siren more seductive than Circe.”13 Like the landscape around him, Travis is silent. He is, for all intents and purposes, a vagrant, but that itself echoes Western heroes. In his classic essay on the Westerner, Robert Warshow observes, “The Westerner is par excellence a man of leisure. Even when he wears the badge of a marshal or, more rarely, owns a ranch, he appears to be unemployed . . . As a rule we do not ask where he sleeps at night and don’t think of asking.”14 In contemporary society there is no place for a man outside the economic system. He is no longer a hero but, as Jack describes himself in Lonely Are the Brave, “a cripple.”
Travis has a brother who is his opposite, a man who has adapted to his world. Walt has built a successful life for himself in billboard advertising (is there a greater desecration of the landscape?) and lives in that other favorite Shepard setting, the Los Angeles hills, once rugged nature and now suburbia, overlooking not valleys, but freeways. “No one walks,” asserts Travis’s son Hunter, now being raised by Walt and his wife. When Travis enters this suburban home, Walt’s wife says, “Welcome home,” an echo of Martha’s opening line to brother-in-law Ethan in The Searchers. But this isn’t Travis’s home and home is an alien concept to Travis. At Walt’s California home Travis gradually, reluctantly, regains language and memories of his parents and of his wife. Gradually, too, Travis builds a bond with his son, teaching him to enjoy walking. At the end, Travis restores his son, Hunter, to the boy’s biological mother in a Houston hotel room and Travis moves on. Travis is incapable of living with the woman he loves and incapable of being anything but a fellow child to his son. The West is the Los Angeles hills and a Houston hotel. Even the Mojave Desert is decorated with highways, motels, and railroad tracks. As Shepard wrote in 1979:
Poor TexasCarved intoLike all the rest(Motel Chronicles 26)
Above all, in Paris, Texas, life is movement, whether it is walking or driving, but this is no longer a westward migration to build an agrarian utopia. Like Travis’s walking at the beginning of the film, it seems to be constantly movement away from something. Other than Walt’s home, the only other domestic spaces we see in Paris, Texas, are motel and hotel rooms, images of transience in this constantly moving society.
Travis asks Walt’s Mexican maid, “What does a father look like?” To the maid, a father is a symbol of affluence, the good provider, so Travis decks himself out in his brother’s three-piece white suit with a matching white fedora. He goes to walk his son home from school, but they walk home on opposite sides of the street. Fatherhood is a role Travis doesn’t know how to play. Domesticated Walt and his wife love Hunter, but they don’t seem capable of having children of their own. Travis is fertile but incapable of maintaining the social structure of family. Bringing Hunter back to his mother is an ambiguous act, a recreation of a family unit in which Travis cannot play a part, but also a destruction of the family Walt has created.
Few Shepard fathers are as benign as Travis. At the beginning of Curse of the Starving Class, young Wesley describes lying awake fearing invasion: “I listened like an animal. My listening was afraid. Afraid of sound. Tense. Like any second something could invade me. Some foreigner. Something indescribable.”15 The invasion Wesley fears is his drunken father Weston (West-on) beating down the door of the family house. The images in Wesley’s speech are surprisingly feminine. Wesley lies on his back fearing a violent assault that has sexual overtones. The father can invade one, take one over. Wesley’s father, Weston, was “infected” by his father:
WESTON I never saw my old man’s poison until I was much older than you. Much older. Then you know how I recognized it?
WESLEY How?
WESTON Because I saw myself infected with it. That’s how. I saw me carrying it around. His poison in my body. You think that’s fair?
(168)
The poison passed on from father to son is violence: “He’s not counting on what’s in my blood. He doesn’t realize the explosiveness” (171). Violence in Curse of the Starving Class is nature: what animals do to each other, what men do to animals, to each other, and to their own families. In a coming-of-age ritual, young Wesley tries to become his father, mimicking his actions:
I started putting all his clothes on. His baseball cap, his tennis shoes, his overcoat. And every time I put one thing on it seemed like a part of him was growing on me. I could feel him taking over me . . . I could feel myself retreating. I could feel him coming in and me going out. Just like the change of the guards.
(197)
By the end of the play, Wesley is being called Weston. The home has been invaded again, this time by men who claim the family’s property as theirs, sold to them by Weston in one of his drunken moments. The violence that is one’s birthright is not the only threat a man faces. The dream and reality of American materialism has crushed Weston and his family: “See, I always figured on the future. I banked on it. I was banking on it getting better. I figured that’s why everyone wants you to buy things” (195).
Son Wesley knows that the threat to their home will not be not natural disaster or Indian raid, but bankers and land developers, men in suits who will take their home and land to build housing developments: “It’s zombie invasion. Taylor [the lawyer his mother has hired and is probably sleeping with] is the head zombie. He’s the scout for the other zombies. He’s only a sign that more zombies are on their way. They’ll be filing through the door pretty soon” (163–64). Losing the house to these developers is “losing a country” (163), the old West.
While dominated by a powerful, yet feckless father-figure, Curse of the Starving Class is filled with images of castration. Like many of Shepard’s plays, it is funny, but a profound sense of anxiety pervades the piece. However violent and destructive, family is the only refuge, but family cannot really protect one. Wesley may have turned, through a kind of ritual mimesis, into his father, but like his father he is ineffectual, incapable of protecting his home. As his father has disappeared once more, Wesley dreams of going to Alaska, the last American frontier, but in Shepard, Alaska hardly seems a serious dream of the frontier:
EMMA What’s in Alaska?
WESLEY The frontier.
EMMA Are you crazy? It’s frozen and full of rapers.
WESLEY It’s full of possibilities. It’s undiscovered.
EMMA Who wants to discover a bunch of ice?
(164)
When Buried Child begins, Tilden has returned from a disastrous attempt to be independent in the mythic West, New Mexico. The old West required a self-containment of which Tilden was incapable: “I was alone. I thought I was dead” (23). So, like the sons in classic American drama, Tilden comes home, in this case to Dodge, a father who doesn’t want him: “You’re a grown man. You shouldn’t be needing your parents at your age. It’s unnatural. There’s nothing we can do for you now anyway” (23).
Dodge is the embodiment of nihilism, never leaving the ratty sofa to which he seems physically attached: “I don’t enjoy anything” (12). Tilden is physically intact, but “Something about him is profoundly burned out and displaced” (12), eerily calm in opposition to his brother, Bradley, who, though missing a leg, finds means of violent, if displaced, aggression. He brutally cuts off his sleeping father’s hair and sticks his fingers in a young woman’s mouth, displaced gestures of castration and impotence. Here is another symbolic fraternal split: passive and aggressive, loving and spiteful, fertile and sterile. Halie, Dodge’s wife, is the typical Shepard matriarch. She is either occupying her room upstairs, filled with pictures of the past and expressing idealized images of her sons, or off having an affair with the ineffectual minister. Halie descends from her upstairs room dressed in mourning, but returns in yellow, her arms full of flowers, still an image of fertility, wife and mother to men who represent forms of sterility.
This family lives in Illinois farm country, in the middle of the American midwest. Buried Child gives us a dark vision of agrarian America in which the land, even the “catastrophic” weather, seem poisoned by the human inhabitants. Into this dysfunctional family comes a third generation, Vince, Tilden’s son and Dodge and Halie’s grandson, eager to reconnect to his family roots. Shelly, Vince’s girlfriend, tells Dodge:
I mean Vince has this thing about his family now. I guess it’s a new thing with him. I kind of find it hard to relate to. But he feels it’s important. You know. I mean he wants to get to know you again. After all this time. Reunite. I don’t have much faith in it myself. Reuniting.
(30)
Shelly expected “turkey dinners and apple pie and all that kinda stuff” (35), the stuff of American mythology. Instead she was brought into a primal American tragedy. Vince is traumatized by not being recognized by father or grandfather. While his very existence is denied by his progenitors, he is still haunted by his family ties. Driving west, he studies the reflection of his face in the windshield as if it were someone else’s:
And then his face changed. His face became his father’s face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same breath. And his father’s face changed to his grandfather’s face. And it went on like that.
(71)
which echoes Tilden’s glimmer of recognition of Vince, “I thought I saw a face inside his face”(44). Vince’s vision turns him back toward the East. For him, as for his father, the West is too full of terrifying truth. Tilden, the only character in the play who expresses positive human attributes like love or loyalty, the only character who is tied to images of fertility, sees the family tie in someone other than himself. Vince’s vision is a reflection, a form of narcissism. The family ties he seeks are inside and have nothing to do with positive human connection. As family ties in Curse of the Starving Class are described as “invasion” or “infection” here they are under the skin, faces beneath faces, an identity beneath the face we show the world outside the family. They are also once again invasion as Vince, singing the Marine hymn, drunkenly assails the ramshackle homestead. When Dodge dies, Vince takes his place as sterile patriarch, carrying on the line.
True West takes place in another symbolic landscape, the hills outside of Los Angeles, also seen in Paris, Texas. The only West left is Alaska, where Austin and Lee’s mother is vacationing when the play begins. Austin has left his wife and children to house-sit for his mother and write a love story for a Hollywood producer. At no point does he seem at all interested or concerned about his own nuclear family. Instead, he is engaged in a battle with his brother, Lee, who has just emerged from the desert, where he was looking for his father. Though the setting is the mother’s suburban house, both parents are identified with less populated, less civilized places, the final frontiers. For the mother, the trip is a vacation she leaves early because she misses her house-plants; domesticated nature is more comforting to her than the glaciers she sees in Alaska. The father wanders drunkenly through desert and border towns, losing his teeth in a bag of Chinese food. Yet this absent father is still an object of sibling rivalry for brothers Austin and Lee.
Austin is writing his Hollywood love story, his “period piece,” by candlelight, using pen and paper instead of typewriter or computer, itself an act of nostalgia:
LEE Isn’t that what the old guys did?
AUSTIN What old guys?
LEE The forefathers. You know.
AUSTIN Forefathers?
LEE Isn’t that what they did? Candlelight burning into the night? Cabins in the wilderness?16
None of this means anything to Austin who seems, in his own way, as disconnected as his sociopath brother, Lee. Both feel remote from the landscape they now inhabit. Lee sees the country as “wiped out” and can only see the domestic behavior of the inhabitants from the outside, looking in the window at the “Blonde people movin’ in and outa’ the rooms, talkin’ to each other. Kinda place you wish you sorta grew up in, ya’ know” (12). But Lee and Austin did grow up in this neighborhood back in the fifties, when people believed in the mythology underlying the new suburban development. Now Austin sees his mother’s neighborhood as a simulacrum of something he vaguely remembers: “Wandering down streets that turn out to be replicas of streets I remember. Streets I misremember. Streets I can’t tell if I lived on or saw in a postcard. Fields that don’t even exist anymore” (49).
Lee forces Austin to help him with his screenplay, “Contemporary Western. Based on a true story” (18). Austin counters: “There’s no such thing as the West anymore! It’s a dead issue!” (35). Lee’s Western is a typical masculine myth: two men, husband and lover of the same woman, chase each other through the panhandle. The chase ceases to be about the woman, but is instead an endless, potentially violent bond of the two men: “And the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn’t know where he’s going” (27). The trouble with Lee’s script is that it is endless, as is True West itself, as the two brothers continue their violent hold on one another: “I can’t stop choking him! He’ll kill me if I stop choking him!” (58). In a sense, Lee’s screenplay comes true in the final mutual grip Austin and Lee have on each other, but there is no heroism in it, none of the nobility of the cowboy duel. As Bonnie Marranca writes: “The heroism and strength of the cowboy is revered by Shepard [and his characters] but in actuality the men he creates are ineffectual, fearful, and emotionally immature. They show no strength of character or will, yet they are allowed to dominate because it is their due as men.”17
The only Western mentioned specifically in Shepard’s True West is Lonely Are the Brave (1962, screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, directed by David Miller), a requiem for all the best aspects of the cowboy. It is worth examining in detail, for many of Shepard’s Western scenes echo this classic film.
When the film begins, we see Jack Burns lying down in the New Mexico desert. The scene looks like the opening of a typical Western, albeit in black and white, used only in the early sixties for “serious” films, but on the sound track we hear the rumbling of jet planes. Jack looks up and sees the vapor trails of what are obviously military aircraft rushing to an unknown destination. This is New Mexico after all, home of the atom bomb. Jack, we find out later, was a decorated soldier in World War II and Korea, but was punished on several occasions for breaches of military discipline. He could be a hero, but not a follower.
Jack and his horse, Whiskey, who seems equally uncomfortable with the sights and sounds of contemporary life, ride off into the desert where they come across a barbed-wire fence put up by a power and water company. Jack cuts the fence (he later says that real Westerners hate fences) and rides on. Fences are easy, four-lane highways much more difficult. Whiskey, herself something of a free spirit who resents being tamed and ridden, panics but finally gets across safely. In a series of shots, Jack and his horse are contrasted visually with truckloads of abandoned cars, the detritus of modern America.
Jack’s destination is the home of his best friends, Paul and Jerry Bondi. Though set in the middle of nowhere, the house looks like any suburban American house. Jerri is in the kitchen when she hears Jack ride up and a loving, expectant look shines on her face. As in The Searchers the hero is loved by a woman who has married someone close to him, knowing that the hero is not the type to settle down. And our hero, though in love with Jerri, is too noble to betray his best friend. Jerri is played by the usually worldly Gena Rowlands in her pre John Cassavetes days. With her perfectly bleached and set hair and fashionable clothes, Jerri hardly seems the frontier type. She is, however, the Traditional Woman, feeding and nurturing the men in her life and making sure their clothes are washed. Jerri’s husband, Paul, is in jail for two years for helping illegal immigrants. Paul has put principle ahead of wife and family. Good Western women know that the rules are there to protect the family and society while their men try to maintain their freedom: “Oh, you men just make me sick. You act like children.”
Jack decides that he is going to get Paul out of jail so that the family can be reunited. To get in jail briefly, he decides to get drunk (drunkenness is another sign of manliness) and disorderly at a local bar, but this bar isn’t the large edifice with the swinging doors of the old Westerns. It’s cramped and sinister, and the classic barroom brawl has degenerated into a very dirty fight with a one-armed psychopath. When the barroom brawl isn’t enough to get Jack in jail, he punches a policeman and is given a longer sentence than he hoped for. In jail, he is beaten by a sadistic guard. Fortunately the jail is anything but high security and Jack finds a way to get Paul and himself out, but Paul, a man who has learned the value of living by the rules, decides to stay: “I’ve got a debt to pay off. If I break out tonight, they’d [his wife and son] be running beside me for the rest of their lives.” Jack responds, “You grew up on me, didn’t you.” The price of maturity is bondage, but it allows one to live safely in society. Jack is constantly beaten up, constantly on the run. He may be the classic Western loner, but he knows that in the modern world a loner is “a cripple.” It is interesting to note that, in the quirky but appropriate casting, Paul looks and dresses more like a character out of the city than a Westerner. The other men in the jail seem to belong in Jack’s world, but not Paul. He has “grown up” into modern urban (or suburban) life. Jack and Paul are friends, not brothers, but their manifestation of the masculine division between good brother and renegade, a classic pattern in Westerns, is a benign version of what we see in True West.
From this point on, Lonely Are the Brave turns into a chase film as the police and the military are brought in to capture Jack as he and his horse slowly try to elude their captors. The chase is crosscut with the progress across New Mexico of a truckload of toilets. Finally, on a rainy night, when Jack’s horse once again balks on crossing the highway, they are hit by the truck. The horse is shot, and Jack is taken off in an ambulance to an uncertain future. The final shot is of Jack’s cowboy hat sitting on a rainy highway, a remnant of the Old West and the anachronistic cowboy who has no driver’s license, no social security number, no address, but who has a mystical, spiritual connection to the land, which is being paved over, built up.
The postwar American Western was always an exercise in nostalgia. Lonely Are the Brave turns that nostalgia into grief. The bored Western sheriff who amuses himself by keeping track of how many times a stray dog can urinate on the same fire hydrant knows Jack embodies what he and his society are missing. The good woman knows that the cowboy is a case of arrested development, but she’s also in love with him. The death of the horse and, symbolically at least, of the cowboy, takes place at night in the rain in a scene filled with black. Though Jack has no words (the cowboy has been silenced, if not killed), the bleak scene echoes classic tragedy.
In True West, Lee and Austin’s battle over their father is a battle over a debased version of the Western loner, mourned in Lonely Are the Brave, but also the problematic father played by John Wayne. Unfortunately, their father is more like Gabby Hayes and the drunken fools who provide comic relief in a John Ford film than like Wayne or Kirk Douglas.
The battle between Lee and Austin, like that between protagonists in so many early Shepard cowboy plays, echoes one of his favorite films, Vera Cruz (1954, screenplay by Roland Kibbee and James Webb, directed by Robert Aldrich). Shepard remembers “trying to imitate Burt Lancaster’s smile after I saw him and Gary Cooper in Vera Cruz. For days I practiced in the back yard. Weaving through the tomato plants. Sneering. Grinning that grin. Sliding my upper lip up over my teeth” (Motel Chronicles 14). What Shepard forgot was that his teeth were crooked and discolored, not at all the perfect pearly whites Lancaster flashes: “I’d forgotten how bad my teeth were.” Girls were not impressed. This adolescent memory turns into a typically Shepard moment of despair: “I stopped grinning after that. I only did it in private. Pretty soon even that faded. I returned to my empty face” (Motel Chronicles 14). Still, in another version of this memory, Shepard credits this moment as the beginning of his career as an actor: “If I know anything about movie acting, it’s from practicing my Burt Lancaster sneer – from Vera Cruz – at sixteen in front of a bedroom mirror.”18
Vera Cruz opens with shots of Ben Trane (Gary Cooper right after the success of High Noon) riding alone through uninhabited wilderness. When his horse is injured, he meets up with Joe Erin (errant?) who will be his sidekick and nemesis throughout the film. While both Ben and Joe are soldiers of fortune out to kill for money in the midst of the Mexican revolution, they are distinctly different personalities. Ben is the classic Gary Cooper character, a loner with a strong code of honor. A descendant of Louisiana aristocracy, Ben has come to Mexico to find money to rebuild his family estate, destroyed by the Civil War. Like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, Ben has never accepted the Confederate defeat. In this Western parable of good and evil, Ben wears the light-colored outfit. Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) is always in black, like the villains of the old B-Westerns. If Ben Trane is the stereotypical Western loner with a code of honor, Joe Erin is the stereotypical Western sociopath, the man who lives outside of society because he can’t live within its laws. Joe, whose motto is “There’s no such thing as an innocent man,” will kill friend and foe alike. His behavior toward the members of his own gang is as awful as his table manners (an aristocratic member of Emperor Maximilian’s court says while watching Joe eat and drink, “Careful, you might get some of that in your mouth”). From their meeting until Ben kills Joe in a gunfight in the final minutes of the film, the two men have an uneasy love–hate relationship. Some critics who see more eroticism in Western male bonding than I do see, as Kate Buford does, Vera Cruz as a film in which “the villain falls in love with the quasi-hero as the only friend he’s ever had and the hero lets him.”19 Ben may need to ally with Joe, but he can never trust him. Joe’s trademark, in addition to his black outfit, is his smile, which is as much of a warning signal as a rattlesnake’s rattle. Joe never seems more menacing than when he tells Ben, “You’re the first friend I ever had.” We see how Joe treats his friends. In his early films, that toothy grin was as much Lancaster’s calling card as Cooper’s stolidity and inarticulateness and Lancaster is clearly using the smile as a contrast to, even friendly mockery of, Cooper’s famous taciturnity. In the wilderness, Ben must play by Joe’s rules. One way or another everyone does, from aristocrats, holding on to colonial territory, to the Juaristas, who picturesquely and absurdly pop up by the hundreds throughout the film, to the women, who must play by the same rules of dishonor to survive, to the outlaws. Ultimately, Ben does the honorable thing and sees to it that the gold in question gets to the revolutionaries. Joe and what he represents have to be killed. Throughout the film Ben allies with Joe because he has to. Joe has the men and the firepower. But Joe seems to keep Ben alive out of fascination. We see him watching Ben to see what he’ll do next. This kind of animal curiosity is as close as Joe comes to human emotion.
It is not surprising that Shepard loved Vera Cruz. The destructive partnership–rivalry of Cooper’s Trane and Lancaster’s Erin is echoed in early plays like The Mad Dog Blues and The Tooth of Crime. More important for our purposes, it is echoed in the relationship of Austin and Lee in True West. In Shepard’s play, an elemental battle is being fought, not over Western values, but over the writing of a Western. Bounty is not gold, but television sets and toasters. Gunfights are replaced by golf matches. The territory to be fought over is astroturf in a suburban kitchen. The True West is their father, toothless and drunk in some desert border town. The idea of the father is worth fighting over because he is what’s left of the West: anarchy, rootlessness, but also arrested development, “grown men acting like little boys” (35). In Shepard’s vision of Vera Cruz, Ben can’t kill Joe, because Joe is inside Ben. They are, at the end, eternally locked together in a comic, but potentially deadly fight.
Much has been written, including by Shepard himself, about Austin and Lee as two halves of a divided personality. It is also important to see them as brothers, family members, and family is every bit as violent in Shepard’s plays as it is in Edward Albee’s work: “You go down to the L.A. Police Department there and ask them what kinda people kill each other the most. What do you think they’d say? . . . Family people. Brothers. Brothers-in-law. Cousins. Real American-type people” (23). As hard as Austin may try to be different from his father, Austin and Lee, like other Shepard sons, have been “infected.” Both are essentially loners who avoid even the human interaction demanded by their familial roles. Lee screams, “This is the last time I try to live with people, boy! I can’t believe it. Here I am! Here I am again in a desperate situation. This would never happen out on the desert” (47). Austin decides he has to escape the unreality of his current situation and go to the desert. Their mother is skeptical:
MOM You gonna go live with your father?
AUSTIN No. We’re going to a different desert Mom.
MOM I see. Well, you’ll probably wind up on the same desert sooner or later.
(53)
The fact is, the desert Austin and Lee seek is exactly where there father is, in a limbo away from any social or familial demands. Lee and Austin at the end are still inside their mother’s home. Like the Western, the desert they seek no longer exists in any meaningful way.
In the course of True West, Austin and Lee trash their mother’s house. In Buried Child Vince cuts through the screen porch to invade his family home which has been strewn with vegetables and beer bottles. Curse of the Starving Class opens with a battered door being repaired. In the course of the play Wesley urinates on a poster on the kitchen floor and brings a live lamb into a temporary pen in the kitchen. The violent destruction of domestic space is the visual counterpart of the damage done to basic familial relationships. The men can only bring the violence and anarchy of their ideal wide open spaces inside, a corollary to the barroom brawls of the classic Western. The Western fantasy is not only fiction: it represents a masculine drive that is Shepard’s idée fixe.
1 Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982), 56. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
2 David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton University Press, 1998), 187.
3 David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 18.
4 Doris Auerbach, “Who Was Icarus’s Mother? The Powerless Mother Figures in the Plays of Sam Shepard,” in Kimball King (ed.), Sam Shepard: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), 53.
5 Quoted in Bruce Weber, “An Unusual Case of Role Reversal,” New York Times, 27 February 2000.
6 Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999), 10.
7 Weber, ‘An Unusual Case,” 37.
8 Ibid., 8.
9 Sam Shepard, Buried Child, revised edn. (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1997), 71. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
10 Sam Shepard, Cruising Paradise: Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 6. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
11 Don Shewey, Sam Shepard, 2nd edn. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 5.
12 Lynda Hart, Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 122.
13 Ibid., 105.
14 Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Athenaeum, 1971), 138.
15 Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 137. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
16 Sam Shepard, True West, in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays, 6. Page references in parentheses within the text are to this edition.
17 Bonnie Marranca (ed.), American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981), 30.
18 Quoted in Kate Buford, Burt Lancaster: An American Life (New York: Knopf, 2000), 138–39.
19 Ibid., 139.