Musings of a Restless Mind

No blasphemy intended by the title, just borrowing a phrase. Allow me to share just a small sample of a single contemporary work set in America’s 1920s to make my point. Let me describe some scenes, so you can tell me what this work is all about.

A young woman is a waitress on a train in a nearly deserted dining car. She asks if a man in a suit sitting alone would like tea. “Coffee,” he replies, giving her an undisguised lecherous look. She brings back the coffee pot from the stove, moves to pour it into the cup, and he moves the cup closer to the edge of the table, deliberately taunting her with, “Try not to spill it.”

As she pours, he forces his hand inside her dress until it’s clear from her expression that he’s penetrating her with his fingers as she tries to keep pouring steadily. “Your words say no, but your body is saying something else,” he arrogantly taunts, and something inside her snaps. She steps back, empties the whole scalding pot of coffee into his lap and proceeds to brutally beat him senseless with the pot.

Typical girl boss, woman power, right? Is she going to gloat now over her would-be oppressor’s cowed body lying on the floor? Is she going to smirk and utter a sarcastic quip like Arnold Schwarzenegger? That’s what we’ve come to expect in modern movies, right?

She runs away, frightened at what she’s done.

So is this a story of female-empowerment or of a a traditional woman who is weaker than a man?

Our heroine is stranded in car that is out of gas and locked in a snowdrift on a deserted road maybe 80 miles from where she hopes to meet her husband after a cross-country trek. She’s searched the corpses of her two frozen benefactors to find what she needs to light a small fire inside the car in the hopes of keeping warm. Finally she resorts to feeding her beloved husband’s letters to the fire with a whispered apology to him as if he were there. She’s already been hunted by lions, shipwrecked and left clinging to the hull of a capsized boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean, forcibly separated from her husband because he was forced to kill a British aristocrat who attacked him, subjected to multiple indignities by immigration, beaten and robbed, and is now alone and stranded in the middle of nowhere trying to keep from freezing. Oh, and she’s also 6 months pregnant.

She looks up to heaven, sobbing, and says, “Is this your plan? This is your plan for us? Let us know love, then rip it from us, then give us a child? Then drag me through hell to freeze here? Hours from him? What kind of god does that?”

It’s at that moment she hears a train whistle as if in answer to her lamentation. She pours whiskey from one of the corpses’ hip flasks onto her little fire to set the whole car ablaze, abandoning her only shelter, in hopes of attracting the attention of the train.

I won’t spoil it for you, but the scene ends in one of the most amazing and dramatic moments ever put to film.

So is this a religious apology, a story of God’s providence in answer to one of life’s toughest questions?

The big villain is a sexual sadist banker who is behind ordering multiple killings to create a resort for him and his fellow filthy capitalists to profit from and whom he entertains at fancy dinners while they all celebrate how much richer they’re going to get. He also smugly insists that he can buy the law to be on his side even as he has casually ordered dozens of murders.

So is this an anti-capitalist manifesto?

A mother sacrificing her own life to give it to her baby even as the doctors want to terminate the pregnancy to save her. After she manages to give birth, they announce the baby won’t survive the hour. She says, “So be it. Give him to me.”

A moment later she says, “A mother who would choose herself over her child is no mother at all.”

So is this a piece of anti-abortion propaganda?

One of the main story lines is that of a 16-year old Crow Nation girl trapped in an Indian school by a bureaucracy that deliberately prevents her family from claiming her. At one point where she is nearly maimed by the head nun, they are brought to the head priest’s office where he brutally punishes both of them. Eventually she escapes after murdering both the head nun and a younger nun who had sexually molested her.

The head priest sets out with two marshals on a long manhunt for the girl, the chief marshal showing utter disregard for those he considers inferior and killing several people they come across. After the marshal shoots an Indian that they surmise was with the girl they’re after, the priest finally objects to him shooting someone who was no threat and was just running away from them. The priest rebukes the marshal as a murderer, and the marshal mocks him, so the priest shoots him 3 times, killing him. The priest continues his quest and kills the girl’s father before he can rise from the campfire where they’re sleeping. He points his pistol at the girl, and insists that she repent and accept salvation before he executes her. She refuses with a curse. “You are refusing salvation!” he screams and pulls the trigger, but his gun is empty. The girl grabs the coals from the fire to slam them into his face, giving herself the opportunity to stab him multiple times, then finding her father’s gun, she finishes him off.

So is this an anti-religion, pro-indigenous people polemic?

Our hero has taken passage on a ship working his way by feeding coal to the boiler. He sleeps with 20 other men in small bunks. One night he’s awakened by someone groaning. He discovers a large man is buggering one of his much smaller workmates. He pulls him off, knocks him to the floor, then goes to check that the victim is ok. The bigger man gets up and pulls a knife. Our hero says, “If you come at me with that knife, I’ll f***ing kill you with it.” He takes off his belt for defense and proceeds to knock the man down again where he continues to hit the prone man with his now belted fist. The captain comes in and orders our hero to drop the belt. He does and explains that the guy was raping the other man. The captain asks the victim if that is true and is able to see the truth by the shame-faced look of the scrawny rape victim’s face. He pulls a pistol and shoots the downed man in the head. The crew hauls the dead man away, and the captain says to our hero, “Clean it up…. Do it in the dark. The men need their sleep.” The scene ends with our hero mopping up the blood in the dark.

So is this a homophobic story of the most vulgar vigilantism?

Our heroine, actually the Countess of Suffolk, is held in virtual house arrest by her family to keep her from pursuing her American cowboy husband. She finagles her way on a transport ship to New York City without papers. At New York, she is shuffled off to Ellis Island where she is subjected to more indignities than she can conceive of. She is undressed and examined inside and out by multiple doctors who casually throw insults at the poor Irish lass they take her for, most of whom they claim are infected with various venereal diseases. All the immigration officials are obnoxious and disdainful of all the immigrants. Eventually, she is ushered into the office of the final immigration judge, who, she’s been assured, will only grant entry to those who will bribe him, either monetarily or sexually. When she is forced to admit that she has no marriage certificate, she’s confronted with disbelief and scorn about America not needing more thieves and prostitutes.

In response to his questions about, “Do you have any marketable skills?” she recites Emma Lazarus’ poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty and then to, “Can you read?” she reads a poem from the Walt Whitman collection he hands her, then tells him he should clean the lipstick from his collar before he goes home to his wife and leans back in her chair. He finally caves and approves her admittance based on her sheer rhetorical bravado.

So is this an anti-Trump, pro-immigrant story?

My answer is that it’s all of the above, and wonderfully so.

One of the reasons I compare Taylor Sheridan to Shakespeare is that there is only one document that we can claim is what Shakespeare ‘said’. That is his last will and testament. He does not speak in any of his plays. There is no author’s voice proclaiming from a soapbox in Shakespeare. He writes conniving villains like Iago, brilliant and clever villains like Richard III, rogueish young men who become heroes like Henry IV, and conflicted men who either yield to temptation like Macbeth or who finally claim the side of their better instincts like Hamlet. And all of his characters, including Shylock, the stereotypical conniving Jew, are given brilliant lines to express their views of life. None of those brilliant speeches in all those plays are Shakespeare talking, rather they are his characters talking. Shakespeare encompassed all of life and expressed every point of view magnificently. “He summed it all up,” is the best, most insightful quote you will ever hear about Shakespeare.

I see that in Taylor Sheridan’s work. None of it is shallow. He observes everything without blinking or flinching, then he writes it down. He shows all sides of life. His villains can be as persuasive as his heroes, and all of them are spellbinding in their own way. Why are his works so popular? Because they don’t preach a silly narrow-minded gospel of “true belief,” rather they illuminate life in all its complexity, and they challenge us to examine our own souls. If you want to understand life without wading through Shakespeare’s centuries’ old English, lay aside your preconceptions and watch Taylor Sheridan’s shows.