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#APStogether Anyone who’s read the scathing 1963 report from the Klan rally included in Escape Velocity, a Charles Portis miscellany, knows the dim view the author took of the white extremism all around him. Not to make large statements of absolution.
#APStogether Yet I don’t how much we’ve talked about this as a 1968 novel, & that Portis is attempting to put the postwar careers of the bushwackers in, obliquely. We forget that Rooster is not the main character, just the star part, because Wayne co-opted & played him twice).
And John Wayne playing Rooster takes away from the degree to which True Grit is a revisionist Western (before the letter) and how often outlaws and lawmen both were likely to be murderers and even—as with Quantrill, et al.—domestic terrorists. #APStogether
(One of my favorite--but really problematic--Westerns on this theme is Anthony Mann's Jimmy Stewart vehicle, Bend of the River.) #APStogether
#APStogether Rooster is so mild, really, yet his resume is terrifying, and it’s just like Portis to slip the terror by us all at once, along with the low comedy of Horace the Clumsy Child.
#APStogether All at once: reminds me a little of how Harry Dean Stanton took all the bits of Repo Man advice Alex Cox had put in the script, mashed them up together as a Creed. All at once, it’s difficult to seize on any one aspect of his resume and let that stand for all.
#APStogether Outlaws became a counterculture staple & the Western had enough currency to see new life in that era…but the era's violence especially against Native Americans, is a kind of “long Civil War,” like Conquistadors taking the fight against the Moors to the New World.
#APStogether In Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas that ongoing violence was of a kind and essentially unbroken. One of the important roles Grant vs. Lee served in postwar revisionism was the idea of a hard, definite end to the war.
An aside: it's a measure of how much defiance means to the Western and the counterculture that Joan Baez, whose fearlessness performing for the Civil Rights movement is rightly legendary, could have a signature song like, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” #APStogether
Made it this far? Thank you for indulging me. The overlap between Civil War & Western (with all the long tails the latter genre has to now) is weirdly under-explored: True Grit is right in the middle of that, up to its armpits, albeit in that low-stakes Portis way. #APStogether
