Why Do You Think I am Paying You if Not to Have My Way?” Genre Complications in the Free‐Market Critiques of Fictional and Filmed Versions of True Grit

Explicating the American frontier inevitably evokes the Rashomon-like complexity of perceptions that has made the Western genre an apt and flexible vehicle for exploring questions of economic and political justice. Over the past century in fiction and film, the Western has offered up a rotating, shape-shifting palette of stakeholders and viewpoints (ranchers may be glorified or vilified, townspeople may be painted as corrupt or virtuous, Native Americans as savage aggressors or innocent victims, and so on). This commodiousness has stretched genre boundaries, and, while genre insurrections have been mounted and subsumed, new narrative tendencies such as postmodernism have arisen to create territories within territories. The resulting heterogeneity has created a bountiful generic landscape in which one simple story of a young girl's hiring of a federal marshal to track her father's killer, a brief tale of free-market justice, may be constructed with widely divergent results as evidenced by the three versions of True Grit—Charles Portis’ 1967 novel, Henry Hathaway's 1968 film adaptation, and Joel and Ethan Coen's 2010 cinematic adaptation. Portis' novel is a wry cautionary tale told in flashback by the protagonist, Mattie Ross, a now elderly and embittered spinster who has given her right arm, literally, as well as her soul to achieve justice for her murdered father and economic security for her family; Rooster Cogburn, the marshal with “true grit,” has died alone and in obscurity, ground down by the need to make a living. Hathaway's adaption, on the other hand, offers a present-tense narrative of free-market triumph that ends with young Mattie coming of age unscathed and hopeful and the aging Cogburn rejuvenated with a new sense of personal and vocational purpose. As for the Coens, they spin a comic yarn of gothic absurdity in which personality is destiny and economics are immaterial; “true grit” is merely true eccentricity dictating Mattie's fate as a wealthy humorless spinster and Cogburn's ignominious end as a carnival sideshow. One story, three different socio-economic outlooks. While that disparity may be viewed simply as the result of opposing political perspectives, the adaptations' alternate directions may also be understood as resultant to generic variations achieved through adaptive techniques. For, each version of True Grit is a distinct iteration of the Western genre; all three may be the same animal, so to speak, yet they each represent a different breed. Like the two films it inspired, the novel is set in post-Civil War Arkansas and what was then the Choctaw Nation (now Oklahoma) and tells the story of 14-year-old Mattie Ross and her quest to bring her father's murderer to justice with the aid of the one-eyed federal marshal Rooster Cogburn and a young Texas Ranger named LeBoeuf. The ambition when doing a period movie is not to sand the edges off the past,' says Joel. ‘In our minds, we never got close to thinking about it in terms of the western. We weren't thinking: let's shoot it in widescreen like Sergio Leone. ‘Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing,’ Ethan interrupts, ‘and it's definitely not opera. And it's definitely not that John Ford tragic thing. Our sensibility has nothing to do with that.’ ‘If anything,’ Joel continues, ‘we were thinking about it more in terms of Alice in Wonderland. She goes across the river into a place where she sees all these weird things, weird landscapes ...and then it becomes weirder and weirder, pushing it more toward a fairytale thing, or Night of the Hunter, in the sense of the landscape becoming more self-consciously poetic. That's about as far from Ford as you can get.’ (Shone) Drawing the Western's parameters as narrowly as a Ford/Leone dichotomy may be something of a pose for the Coens, given their previous appropriation of the genre's tropes and signposts in films such as The Big Lebowski (1998) and No Country for Old Men (2007). Don't fence us in, the filmmakers seem to protest, while surely recognizing the Western covers a vast territory, stretching back to Civil War era pulp novels. Since Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 foundational frontier essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the mythos of the western frontier has infused the nation's political and cultural outlook so deeply it is almost impossible to imagine twentieth century America without it. Certainly it is hard to imagine Hollywood without it. The industry's first “prestige” picture was Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery in 1903, five years before the real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are said to have died in a Bolivian shootout (Varner xiii). More than 4000 Westerns were produced between 1926 and 1967 alone, constituting a quarter of all Hollywood film production (Indick 1). During the second half of the twentieth century, the Western served as the nation's “cultural wallpaper,” even as it provided a diverse means of aesthetic, cultural, and political expression (O'Brien 38). Still, the Western's very vastness over time and terrain has given rise to a sprawling and overlapping taxonomy, making it impossible to corral every single Western into a neat category. The oldest and most predominate type of Western, at least in sheer volume (and the one perhaps most firmly branded in public consciousness) is the classical Western, wherein the cowboy hero saves and purifies a community by means of “regenerative violence” (Varner 48). In the sixties, the antimyth Western challenged the idea of the classical hero and debated the virtue of the violence, and in turn birthed a range of variants including the revisionist or counterculture Western, neorealist, and formalist Westerns; in the meantime the psychological and gunfighter Westerns, begat from the fifties renaissance Western, concerned themselves with social justice and balancing the rights of the haves and have-nots (Slotkin 279); the elegiac Western mourned the death of the old West; the spaghetti Western “deterritorialized” the genre's geography and moral center, serving as a key influence in the formalist Western (Varner 95); other generic subtypes include: the feminist Western, the African-American Western, even the post-Western (Varner 11), and the postmodern Western (Varner 168). Richard Slotkin and Michael Coyne establish broader categorizations, Slotkin dividing the Western generally into two political camps, the “progressive,” favoring consolidation of power into more efficient corporate and government economies, and the “populist,” upholding Jeffersonian agrarian and economic individualism (22). While identifying four categories—mythic, auteurist, structuralist, and political-allegorical—Coyne creates an overarching dichotomy of sociopolitical versus psychological, with his “community Westerns,” largely synonymous with classical Westerns, and his “odyssey Westerns” which “equate the rugged landscapes with the individual's tortured soul” (7). Because the Western is set on the frontier where government structures are primitive and territorial boundaries often unsettled, stories in the genre are usually animated by a central conflict concerning the allocation of physical or legal resources—in other words, the land or the law. However, those immediate concerns may or may not be what any particular Western is “about.” Coyne, for example, suggests that “the community Western often reflects the tension between citizen and society, while the odyssey Western customarily includes this conflict only to transcend it—and centres [sic] thereafter on interplay between psyche and landscape” (7). Of course, the genre is also used, as any historical genre is often employed, to examine current problems through the lens of past dilemmas. Stanley Corkin is far from alone in identifying the cowboy of the fifties as America's symbolic cold warrior in films that reveal the construct “of national identity in a period marked by intense chauvinism and broad acceptance of a kind of economic and cultural hegemony” (71). Examining Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) and John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), Corkin sees the cowboy as bringing order and economic vitality to untamed civilizations, a function many believed America should perform in the Cold War world, and that, “in the highly influential terms of these films, the genius defined by the frontier experience and of American exceptionalism is the way in which the ‘West’ ultimately produces a world made safe for corporate capitalism in an international context” (88). Yet Ford, the supposedly staunch Cold War defender, also revised Alan LeMay's story in his 1956 adaptation of The Searchers, so that Slotkin can view that film as directly challenging the “‘savage war’/Cold War analogy” and its “overwhelming, and finally malign, pressure to choose ‘destruction’ over ‘rescue’” (Slotkin 474). Moreover, any broad acceptance of American hegemony gave way during the 1960s, as the hegemony of the classical Western was in turn broken by revisionist categories and dissenting opinions in films ranging from Arthur Pen's Little Big Man (1970) to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), and from George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) to Ralph Nelson's Soldier Blue (1970). Tellingly, Sergio Leone overruled Henry Fonda's desire to hide his blue eyes behind brown contact lens to play the villain of the 1968 classic Once Upon a Time in the West (Teichmann 302). While the Western steadily fell from popularity throughout the seventies, suffering a near death blow from Michael Cimino's 1980 disaster, Heaven's Gate, some critics see the Western's influence as indomitable—or, perhaps, insidious. According to Anderson the myth of the frontier and “its apology for and promotion of cowboy imperialism, Manifest Destiny, and all that this cultural doctrine implies” lives on so strongly his definition of the “Frontier Western” encompasses everything from Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) to Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) and even to the Coens' Lebowski (6). Acknowledging that films such as Raiders provide “a powerful recrudescence of the old myths of regeneration through violence,” Slotkin dismisses them as mere “genre-nostalgia” (640), yet writing in 1995 he also viewed “Reaganomics” as the third formulation of Turner's frontier hypothesis in its assertion that low taxes and deregulation would serve “in just the way that the opening of ‘vast untapped reserves’ of free land or gold or cheap oil on the Frontier had energized the economy of the past” (646). As for the diverging political and economic views offered up by the three versions of True Grit, they may be understood as a consequence of genre variation: Portis' novel is both an elegy and revisionist Western, mourning the loss of heroic individualism while demythologizing any romantic ideals of frontier community. Hathaway's film is a classical Western (or in Coyne's classification a community Western) glorifying society and the hero who saves it, while the Coens' adaptation is both a postmodern and an odyssey Western, emphasizing isolation and psychological aberrance over any overtly political vision. As to how the two adaptations could arrive at what are essentially opposing destinations and philosophies—opposite to each other as well as to their source material—a partial answer is most obviously apparent in adaptive techniques. The film-maker bent on ‘faithful’ adaptation must, as a basis for such an enterprise, seek to preserve the major cardinal functions. [...] However, even if the latter are preserved in the filming process, they can be ‘deformed’ by varying the catalysers which surround them. (14) To understand the adaptations' alteration of cardinal functions and distortion of catalyzers, it is necessary to begin with a brief review of the novel itself. Appearing at a time when American assumptions about national power and domestic norms were under question as never before, the novel True Grit was an unqualified success, both rebutting and affirming those assumptions simultaneously by juxtaposing high heroics against a backdrop of drab, even squalid, economics. Although as previously noted, while the Western is generally concerned with the allocation of resources, those allocations are often framed in lofty terms of peace and justice. True Grit's economic concerns feel more Dickens than dime novel—a revisionist take on the frontier that is also elegiac, couched as a memoir related by Mattie in old age from her home in Yell County, Arkansas, purporting to be the “true account” of her long-ago adventure in the Choctaw Nation when she set out to bring her father's murderer to justice. The crime precipitating Mattie's quest is simple and brutal: “[A] coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces ...” (Portis 9) The novel's quest plot is also straightforward: Mattie leaves behind two younger siblings and a mother “who can't spell cat” to go to Fort Smith to claim her father's body and settle his affairs (Portis 13). Once there, she drives a good bargain with the auctioneer who sold Tom Ross a string of ponies before his death, but she also discovers Chaney has escaped westward into the Choctaw Nation and has joined the Ned Pepper outlaw gang. Determined to see justice done, she uses the promise of her settlement money to contract with the federal marshal Rooster Cogburn, a “man with true grit,” to ride into the Nation to apprehend Chaney (Portis 55). However, before they can set off, the Texas Ranger LeBoeuf arrives in pursuit of Chaney for the murder of a Texas senator. When Mattie rebuffs his request to join the search—she wants Chaney to face a judge in Arkansas not in Texas—LeBoeuf goes directly to Cogburn, and Mattie finds the two men negotiating over the substantial Texas bounty. Cogburn tells Mattie it does not matter where Chaney hangs, but Mattie is adamant. “Why do you think I am paying you if not to have my way?” she says (Portis 93). Unfortunately for Mattie, LeBoeuf's “way” is more lucrative. Yet the young girl will not be deterred even when she is left behind. Armed against the winter cold with her father's hat and coat and carrying his old dragoon pistol, she catches up with Cogburn and LeBoeuf as they cross the river into the Choctaw Nation, earning her place in the posse with her fearless horsemanship. Deeper into the Nation, they ambush Pepper's accomplices, and later Mattie is kidnapped by the Pepper gang and taken to a high rock ledge where she is left alone with the homicidal Chaney. As LeBoeuf arrives to rescue her, in the field below Cogburn confronts Ned Pepper and his three fellow outlaws. In the ensuing gunfight, the marshal kills three of the gang and, from the ledge, LeBoeuf shoots Pepper in time to save Cogburn who has been pinned under his fallen horse. At that, Chaney jumps from behind to bash LeBoeuf's head; Mattie shoots Chaney, but the recoil from her father's revolver throws her backward into a snake pit, where she breaks her arm and is snake-bitten. Cogburn reaches the ledge and kills Chaney, and, after he and LeBoeuf manage to pull Mattie out, he makes a dramatic race with Mattie to the doctor to save her life. In the novel True Grit, every turn of the story is driven or marked by the act of negotiation against a backdrop of harsh economic conditions, beginning with Mattie's need to “outsource” justice by hiring a federal marshal (her ability to do so made possible only by her earlier savvy negotiations with the auctioneer), and with the sizable bounty that has LeBoeuf on that do not hard cash often Cogburn for with an Pepper aid and his later to Pepper to Mattie and Chaney for the and Mattie's of her to Chaney in for her life. Although negotiations key in the two their and In the Coens' film, their is and through catalyzers, while in film, in cardinal with the of an Hollywood the as a the novel's is set in the twentieth century, with a yet the in the Rooster Cogburn has and, even by the time of his death in 1903, the Wild West had down to a carnival the with of by Cogburn, and Mattie to for what she will be her first with Cogburn her after and over the years to contact the even as he and at and However, in Mattie only and and as they Mattie of Cogburn's death by an that he (Portis her arm to that long-ago Mattie to be in way as she has and a and spinster with of money but close and one who can even the of her long-ago both her and the community at she only all of Yell of her as a old who has simply a by Cogburn's from the in and in her (Portis are the of the free-market Mattie True Grit negotiating to her mother and siblings and to bring her father's to she ends as a wealthy driven to out of to to on her or to the the for Cogburn's a to have the a The young girl of and “true grit” has so in her thinking she up the of Cogburn's (Portis his and on the frontier as a place where heroics are and but is just as necessary and, in its just as Mattie has body soul in one In Hathaway's film, this is by an that Mattie, Cogburn, and LeBoeuf into an Cogburn Mattie, her arm in a but to her Yell home where she him to her in the when they In all three of True Grit, Cogburn is to be a However, in Hathaway's Cogburn's is for through and Cogburn's that even his does not to the is both and when he Mattie's is when Mattie Cogburn her father's and the is when Cogburn over a fence to ride off into the as the and Mattie the with a hopeful with these to cardinal functions all the elegiac and revisionist of the story, Hathaway's film is a adventure Western in the classical and community up an Old West that is and very a place where community over As and as by a Hathaway's Mattie is and more for than the novel's In this version by is by in cardinal which has the of LeBoeuf's as a fallen when Mattie her an romantic in her at the also the landscape and the film in the high of than the novel's of and of the against the backdrop of by a of the of classical Westerns of the the Man with his Hathaway's True Grit offers up a view of a free-market frontier where and to all their economic the end of the film, have to that have even the as a as well as Mattie's and Cogburn's As a now and Rooster Cogburn into the surely to more he leaves a hopeful (and Mattie Ross on a high and on the of a life. The and the who up this were both old Hollywood their into the after and with Hathaway's first as a in with the Western of the and, in the years to making True Grit, he or four including The of John and the West one of had a more in In the and she was highly and highly but in she to before the and was is that of both the Western and should his only from a by a but the more question is one should view True Grit's of frontier capitalism as the apology or of a To this the of to reveal a in not to but to movie to complexity to a American story in a narrative and to money as a of a powerful in film and more for than even during the by the by who gave her a and her in a way that her to that they of that she would not and in the after the she Hathaway's 1968 and she would go on to Hathaway's The and perhaps most to the classical Western was as the and of was on stories about and their and I all the she said As they their ride these two at at not just to make a for the classical Western, but to into the of the with the of Cogburn's on Ned when John a of more than made his now may have he on his the of and even the Western genre itself. also had his personal in the of his of of his had across the public so strongly that was to her that be the shootout that could the a suffering from a in need of an on was for as the of all on their physical in this John has been constructed more than most (or at least more than most as a is in and while he over the in to critics like the film and out of with the True Grit the after Sam and his Wild Bunch into up a of and, True Grit to its view of the as John on a far more than the heroic had to had hard men with than in Red River and the in The the had never before a so to an so on In the beginning of Red land from its but that is into a enterprise, a that a some of from the murder of the he Moreover, Ethan is to be a “man of the Rooster Cogburn, on the other hand, is not only a who off his he is also a but who simply he the Yet this becomes an in the the and to the to hard and into the gunfight, then as hard to save Mattie's not only by the for Mattie but also by the of those earlier of men and with of Ethan in as the the genre in these new The True Grit of this posse In throughout the the of the Western's as Hollywood to examine the Old now through a more was not 1980 when his Heaven's Gate, that the Western its to then the had its in and Hollywood was to on for and that with Still, the Western in as a of expression [...] than a for the of the Coens, postmodern who into four years after the Heaven's with the crime a by the novel Red have through of the Coens' the which to and Lebowski and by The Big and The As for the of like most of their postmodern the do not from it so as it that of of genre is in of generic or of or simply of as in the of a classic into usually is perhaps the most of the the the for example, a down those without in the as and her in it is also possible to with its of Yet is also that in both of her and of the or perhaps a about those means of with what As out, the Coens' on and feel that the are up of their as if with a of and The one film in which the it is No Country for Old with western to the

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• The Crowded Prairie

  Robert Murray Davis, Michael Coyne•Journal of American History•2000

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