And the terror and the horror
God, I wonder why we bother, whoa, whoa
All the glamor and the trauma
And the fuckin’ melodrama, whoa, whoa
All the gun fights and the lime lights
And the holy sick divine nights, whoa
They’ll talk about us, all the lovers
How we kiss and kill each other, whoa
–“Sober II (Melodrama),” Lorde
1.
If you comb through the vast landscape of literature and visual art describing the American West, you might think it impossible not to begin with the land: How it awes and informs, how its beauty and its vastness dwarf human life and provide the setting for humanity’s most spectacular and mundane interactions. The land has been stolen, redistributed, carved up, exploited, deemed both evil and divine; it can’t help but change you. The West described here is a setting, of course. It has been made into the psychic tapestry of an entire national purpose: expansion, exploration, a wide and rich slice of God’s country. But its function in the Western, as a genre, has always been to dramatize, or undergird the perception of the land as central to the expansion of the American project—of a certain era of American history and a certain way of life during that era. This is true even when a project, say, David Grann’s and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, respectively, seeks to correct the record, and illustrate a history that is unvarnished and accurate, divorced from the supposed exploitations of genre and fantasy. Lurking beneath even the best of such endeavors is an unstated belief that history alone isn’t enough to combat the human propensity for spectacle and exaggeration.
Indeed, the West and its typifying genre are infected by a writer’s desire to invent outside of history, which is never as straightforward or thrilling as it could be, for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America as imagined by people who were never there but perceive something indelible, something essential about themselves, or the country, that might be retrieved within the fabric of its vastness, illustrating the soul of the country by using time as a paintbrush. Melodrama supersedes. The impulse to intervene where history underwhelms, or, usually, omits, has kept the Western alive, no matter who helms the narrative, no matter the political scope of the project, whether in service of racist myth or indigenous reparation. Deconstructionist narratives—James Mangold’s Logan, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Jordan Peele’s Nope, for example—subsume a heightened yet self-conscious awareness of the retrograde elements of the Western: its assumptions about necessary violence against outsiders, about the land’s abundance, about the knotted liberation it enacts, seemingly unable to halt a projection of those elements as genre-veiled truth. In the West, an extremity of language and philosophy, of stark morality and behavior, seemingly reflects the extremity of the region.
2.
James Benning’s 1995 documentary Deseret is a lightning rod. It’s different from the status quo narrative that makes the southwest out to be a last refuge for American freedom, as it begins and ends with the land as a constant tether, an almost omniscient presence silently looking out from the depths of geological time. The film, which came out eight years before Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, which charts nominally similar subject matter, doesn’t so much deconstruct the Western as reject its premises completely. Over the course of 82 minutes, Benning culls passages from 93 reports made over the course of 140 years in the New York Times: an archive charting the settling and development of the state of Utah. Each report, narrated in the documentary by Fred Gardner, a performer whose work has appeared nowhere else before or since, is 6 to 7 sentences long. There is a new shot for each sentence, and the film goes from black-and-white to color, switching from the former to the latter on May 3, 1900, around the time of the first color cinematography. There is no music and all the sound is diegetic, just the faint brush of the wind and distant clankings of work in the background. As a piece of narrative art, Deseret strips away any extraneous element that distracts from the words and the image: a choice that necessarily focuses the viewer’s attention on the implications of the text.
Immediately, one will notice that the film is by no means an objective project, and better for it. Benning’s textual selections are not random, but damning, revealing and reiterating the deleterious effect that the Mormon Church has had on the Utah territory and its native people, as well as the American government’s opposition and eventual acquiescence to this often violent, enterprising ethos. A New York Times report Gardner reads from November 19, 1857:
With the history behind them, a history of nearly 30 years of trial and suffering, the Mormons of Salt Lake are now a nation rather than a religion. They are very strongly entrenched in their continental Palestine…Mormonism in Utah is no longer a contemptible delusion. It has swelled from the proportions of a pitiful sect into those of an organized people.
But to make this point more clearly, Benning perhaps counterintuitively eschews dramatic emphasis. There is no plaintive sweep of an orchestra, just a handful of distant faces, houses, construction sites, vistas. Inasmuch as it is possible to simply present, Benning does so quietly, but relentlessly.
3.
James Baldwin’s criticism in his 1976 essay The Devil Finds Work suggests the possibility of an overwhelming power in Western cinema. In other words, that what cinema can offer, specifically to white American audiences, is not something so petty as an endorsement of a director’s values, but the projection of a dream: of a promised land that has been cleansed of the mongrel taint and rendered fresh, blank.
Phillip Reed was the Indian, Uncas, whose savage, not to say slavish adoration of Miss Angel’s fine blonde frame drives her over a cliff, headlong, to her death…The erring Uncas eventually pays for his misguided lust with his life, and a tremulous, wet-eyed brave couple, Randolph Scott and Binnie Barnes, eventually, hand in hand, manage to make it out of the wilderness.
American cinema is nothing short of the dramatization of the desires and fears of an entire people. For Baldwin’s purposes, this means an American people drunk on the promises of the unreachable Western idyll, of green pastures and mastery over others, especially “the Other.” Talking about In the Heat of the Night, a 1967 mystery drama, Baldwin writes, “No: the film helplessly conveys–without confronting–the anguish of people trapped in a legend. They cannot live within this legend; neither can they step out of it.”
Cinema’s most familiar language is drama. It is tempting to believe that this drama is merely the way life is experienced, as a series of scenes, of moments gilded by endless, earth-shattering consequence, a million films every second winning a million Oscars. “It is not that the creators of the film were inspired by base motives,” Baldwin writes. “But that they could not understand their motives, nor be responsible for the effect of their exceedingly complex motives, in action.”
4.
Over 55,000 photo suggestions appear when one searches “dramatic desert landscape” in Getty Images. Many of these photos aren’t “real,” or at least, they are not presented raw, without some form of digital alteration: They are not the documentary photographs of Dorothea Lange or Jack Delano but rather obviously, unimaginatively staged, like a Hollywood film set. Some appear AI-generated. Several feature the same silhouette of a man with medium-length hair wearing pants and an uncollared shirt “hiking” across some heavily airbrushed vista, his form just slightly too big for his surroundings, a kind of minor giant in a digitally-rendered world. These are stock photos, of course, and their use is easy to surmise: a general vibe of wildness, a gesture towards the concept of natural beauty. They are not authentic depictions of the West—they don’t try to be—but reminders of a familiar place, a vague, comforting setting more than a specific location. The drama, as such, is relegated to the impossible limit of the horizon, the oversaturated colors of sand, rock, and night sky, an intimation of the cosmos leaking down into the earth from above, the improbability of any human presence at all, save for this man in the frame. The implication of his presence here is a familiar one, conjuring a sanitized, anodyne vision of an American colonialist project. An image of the desert presents an immediate narrative of non-human time, and an archive of disputation and conflict. This is the desert as battleground, the West as an endless massacre, winner takes all, white, red, or black, anything goes and anyone can stay, so long as the story is worth talking about.
5.
“Let’s just say the Utah Travel Council won’t be calling Benning to see if his film can be used in a ‘Come to Utah’ campaign,” journalist Chris Hick wrote in Deseret News, Utah’s first newspaper, in May of 1996. The Mormon Church claims “deseret” comes from an ancient language used by a group called the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon. The word, which looks suspiciously close to the one that describes the western landscape, means “honeybee” in the Jaredite language. Reflective of the newspaper’s ownership by the Mormon Church, who initially proposed that their newfound Western home be called “Deseret” instead of Utah, Deseret News utilizes that vaunted, failed dream as its namesake.
If Deseret the film had been released widely, which it hadn’t due to its lack of a major distributor, one could think of no better blurb than Chris Hick’s to place in the trailer’s closing scene. The irony, for Hick, is that Benning is neither interested in endorsement nor boycotting the Utah region. Tourism promises an experience worth paying for, and its lack implies money destined to be wasted. In Westerns, the value of land—land that is perceived to be untainted—is often premised on future transformations of raw material into saleable products. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, a noir birthed from Western sensibilities, turns on the concept of water as a commodity from which an entire city might be built. In the 2007 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s 3:10 to Yuma, the value of a ranch that might be razed to make way for the railroad decreases if people still live on it. Avarice disguises itself as conspiracy and opportunity. Deseret suggests such instrumentalization of both land and people is more plainly sinister, a repeating cycle of moving people out of the way. This suggestion is made through the film’s accumulation of shots of the desert, of the Utah mountains and valleys, these moments of footage that could have easily been still images. They render a sometimes eerie feeling that someone or something has just stepped, or more likely, been pushed, out of frame. Speaking to Artforum in 2007, Benning said of this style, “One of the shots…is of the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where a wagon train of Arkansas pioneers were killed by Mormons dressed as Paiute Indians. Everyone who could talk was murdered, more than 120 men, women, and children.” In the present, there is no physical marker to remember the massacre by. Indeed, viewers who will never read Benning’s comments on the film or research the history of Utah will be living proof that a sanitized view of the state, and of the Mormon Church, prevailed.
6.
I keep returning to the “Western” because it is a category that appears to be inescapable, even across non-American cultures and newer generations; the spaghetti Western, a product of Italy, remains among the foremost, essential examples. Killers of the Flower Moon, a film and a book charting murders of the Osage Tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, would seem to be anything but a Western as popularly conceived—and yet Wikipedia deems it so. There may be cowboy hats and men on horseback riding through the plains, but this year’s Twisters has both of these and isn’t considered anything but a disaster movie—a characterization that better suits Killers of the Flower Moon. One becomes suspicious that part of what justifies the “Western” label is the conspicuous presence of Native Americans, of the iconography of indigenous American culture as something entwined with the genre. It’s an irony that borders on cruelty. The Western has been revised many times, yet its foundation always lies in the exploitation of indigenous bodies. Perhaps this is why the press leading up to Killers of the Flower Moon’s release focused so heavily on how the involvement of the Osage in the production fundamentally changed the film’s structure and tenor: Instead of callous use and abuse, there was collaboration and mutual understanding, the studios insisted. The subject matter—all that death, all that suffering—might not have changed, but the angle from which it was approached did. The logic, then, that a film that would witness the severity and disregard for indigenous life would be considered a Western is a perverse one. In Scorsese’s case, he confirms this definitional element of the genre: the involvement of indigenous people is essential, but here’s how we made it more “authentic.”
7.
America has always been a country premised on exploitation. Perhaps it is useful to think of the West as an exploited region and the Western thus an exploitation genre premised on its lurid depiction, and dependence on, violence. If so, one film rises to this designation above all others: It’s funny, watching A World Unseen (2016), the behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of The Revenant (2015), how self-important the project of this particular adaptation remains. Director Alejandro Iñárritu’s experientially-oriented filmmaking techniques, which are apt to push bloodshed and a twitching mouth ready to scream as close to the camera lens as possible, flounder. They cannot match the ambition of his own ego. The Revenant is a Western without any sense of humility or respect for its subject matter, only the weight of its importance. It would single-handedly heal the world with its unflinching sentimentality. Lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio calls The Revenant a “triumph of the human spirit” and A World Unseen does its best to furnish this statement with evidence. Mostly, through the same emotionally manipulative techniques one sees in a well-produced commercial for a cancer treatment. Between stretches of footage documenting the production, there are vignettes on indigenous representation, about the film as a way of lifting up obscure indigenous non-actors to the level of Hollywood stardom. Iñárritu’s addition of a fictional interracial relationship between fur trapper Hugh Glass and an indigenous woman who has no name in the credits, and thus the inclusion of a half-Native child who is eventually murdered by Glass’s betrayers, is his idea of legitimizing the melodrama that ensues. “When the filial relation is involved, you just get a much more powerful understanding of your being and your reason to be,” Iñárritu says in the behind-the-scenes documentary. “So it was not as easy as sometimes wanting to see Indians against white people, no. Having Indian blood will make a much more complex situation for both of them.” Unsurprisingly, this is the philosophy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, which awarded The Revenant 12 nominations and 3 Oscars.
8.
“A lone ‘hard-rock engineer,’ walking to the rim of the canyon and saying to that flash and treacherous stream, ‘Old man, my friends and I are going to tame you!’”
“A Big Dam Out West”, The New York Times, March 14, 1931
“The Desert Tamed”, Chapter 8 of the Life Nature Library from The Desert, published 1962. From the introduction, “The desert is man’s future land bank.”
9.
Deseret acts as a ballast and a comparison. A documentary rather than historical fiction, it is dry and unadorned, qualities evident in each setup, in each sentence narrated. I used to think Gardner’s narration was monotonous, but it is merely clear: In fact, one can hear a certain excitement in his voice depending on which excerpt he reads from. This is compounded by the surprise that each new sentence and each shot brings. One moment, a snowy forest, the next a dune littered with shrubs. All the while, the on-location audio captured from each shot plays behind Gardner’s voice, an effect that makes it seem as if he is speaking over the phone. Deseret unfolds almost like a transmission. Its location is Utah but its intended destination is the soul of the country. Benning is in love with the landscape, or at least affords it his sustained attention. It is not a landscape better off without people, but one haunted by them.
10.
“The worst thing you can do looking at history is to judge people in historical settings on today’s values and interpretations,” says Clay Landry, the wilderness advisor for The Revenant. “You’ve got to put your mind back there, you’ve got to understand the total picture…there is an importance to understanding your history. The history of your family, the history of your area, the history of your ethnicity, whatever it is.” Landry cosplays with the cast. His fetish for history is one that savors the accessories of battle and warfare. In A World Unseen, we see him directing actors on how to properly hold rifles, how to move through the forest, how to carve up animals. Iñárritu watches all of this in a kind of art installation, part of the frame of the documentary. The director sits between two screens in a room with whitewashed walls: One screen shows the documentary, the other the film. Iñárritu’s reactions are meaningful because they have to be. The emphasis of this pageantry is how much The Revenant gets right, how much it shocks and disturbs because of all the truth it holds. “This is where we originally were…you think of history and these things happening a way long time ago but it’s in our lifetime and it’s still happening,” a presumably indigenous woman says during A World Unseen, her face never shown, but her voice audible, saccharine piano playing over handheld closeup, the legacy of a surviving people minimized into a PSA, their history merely an ad.
11.
Maybe DiCaprio felt some embarrassment after his decades-long quest for an Oscar finally succeeded. The Revenant fawns over a resourceful colonizer’s indomitable spirit. Killers of the Flower Moon instead fashions the colonizer played by DiCaprio as an easily duped idiot, meek, cowardly, duplicitous, in love with money more than life.
12.
If there is a central character in Deseret beyond the land, it is Brigham Young, the early Mormon leader who dies halfway through the film. This Young is glimpsed from afar, in dispatches from meetings and missives sent to the U.S. government. The closest “look” the audience receives comes after his death, when a reporter gives a disarmingly detailed and sensual description of his face. It is Young’s normalcy, his ordinariness that makes his deeds—the forceful capture of land, the denigration and slaughter of indigenous people, the callous capitalistic desire to expand, the misogynistic doctrine of forced polygamy—even more despicable. The evil of his actions were banal and matter-of-fact. One reads Young’s words and the accounts of his contemporaries and finds it hard to learn anything from him. Which is to say, there is no dynamism to his being, no shaping of mind that would render him a compelling character. At one point in Deseret, Gardner reads, “Selfish, sensuous, and avaricious, Brigham Young could be and often was audaciously cruel, frequently betraying the spirit of a murderer, even if not following his brutal example.” In Deseret, Young is another nefarious interloper whose legacy would later be sanitized and worshipped, villainous and yet not a villain.
13.
Closer is buffalo hunter Miller in John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing: a man who, like the mad captain Ahab, has chosen blood over the heart that pumps it. In the novel, a naive young Harvard graduate named William sets out for adventure and self-knowledge in Kansas. He finds Miller, a man to rise to the challenge of his boyhood fantasies, and eventually, finds ruination. The journey west is incomplete without a goal, without a boon, without the promise of something better at the end. Miller, who decries the inferior quality of the buffalo hides brought in by local hunting parties, intends to utilize a secret valley in Colorado he once came across. After weeks of arduous travel, Miller’s party finds an abundant range teeming with thousands of buffalo. Miller intends to kill every last one of them. Such savagery transforms William. Witnessing the grim, repulsive massacre of the buffalo—the harvesting of their hides, the breaking of their skulls, the stripping of their meat, the humps of their corpses dotting the ground—does not make him a better or worse person. Though the reader may encounter the novel’s theme, horror and disgust at man’s murderous impulse, for William, there is no lesson to be learned: “It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.”
14.
As Deseret moves from black-and-white to color when it reaches the end of the 19th century, Utah’s history, its fields, its horse-and-wagon period signifiers, the picture of a Western state trapped in the posture of reenactment, disappears. The United States has accepted Utah into the Union and the poisonous work of modernization begins in earnest. On January 9, 1990, the New York Times reported on the decline of Marystown in tandem with the death and sickness of its population, many of whom were miners exposed to radiation while harvesting uranium for nuclear testing. On November 24, 1990, a report on the lack of water or electricity on the Navajo reservation, which is being exploited for gas. Deseret makes no claim to contain the full history of Utah—no film could. And yet, within it lies a history of its surroundings. The documentary’s pared-back presentation is not without its own drama, the simplified style still a style, the uniformity of composition and editing a marker of the film’s seriousness. Benning is not making light of what he has researched nor does he taint it with the weight of auteurist control. That he does not endeavor to depict that research speaks to his belief that history might stand on its own. Where there would be music, the wind. Where there would be actors, the mountains. The West is distilled down to its primordial constants.
15.
Benning does not end his film with an encapsulation of all that has come before it, with a report reflecting on the country’s betrayed values, on Utah’s complex and unsettling creation. Deseret does not end with people, but a different form of life.
The final report is from December 21, 1992. It details the identification of a root system consisting of 47,000 aspen trees in the Wasatch Mountains as the single largest organism in the world. A connectedness runs through the West, though it is not as tidy as this. It is more diffuse and much larger than one account, or 47,000. In a region where liberty and independence are seen as opposing forces, Deseret considers what the Western does not: escape is not the answer, it is not even possible. Life is harsh and abundant and lonely, but not always, not forever. Benning pulls out a small example, one that describes the resilience of nature, which, though beautiful, feels unfathomably distant from the rhythms of contemporary human life. Perhaps it is more resonant to think that this resilience comes despite what’s been wrought on the world. There are limits to our individuality that we can’t always overcome. The lone rider must stop for shelter. The hunter must visit the healer to be healed. The family must open their doors. “When the trees change color in the fall, they do so in unison.”
Nicholas Russell
Nicholas Russell is a writer and critic from Las Vegas. His debut novel is forthcoming from Ecco.