True Grit

Several worthwhile reviews of True Grit from Stanley Fish, Allen Barra, Peter Lawler (here and here), Robert Cheeks, and J.L. Wall.

Fish's is the most interesting. Against a disappointed critic who missed the "great cinematic moments" that defined John Wayne's film, he argues that the Coens intended to show two kinds of heroism whose practice is not "climactic and defining" in a cinematic, momentary way. The first kind is physical and is "displayed by almost everyone, 'good' and 'bad' alike." The second, "better" heroism is religious and is manifest in Mattie's confident adherence to a "hard doctrine" that offers no glimpse of the eternal consequences of mortal action. Both are different from the heroism of virtue because they are dramatized in an "at best indifferent, at worst hostile" universe in which, as Mattie says in the film's final line, "time gets away from us."

There are two ways of approaching Fish's accounts of heroism and the universe in which that heroism is dramatized. Peter Lawler argues that when Fish writes that Mattie heroically "maintains her convictions even when the world continues to provide no support for them," he refrains from granting her narrative the privilege of "objective" value; her's is only the individual's commitment to the righteousness of their own "final vocabulary." Thus, any account of her heroism cannot "tell the truth about who we are." In other words, because the truth it tells has no objective content, its communication cannot constitute a community. Luckily, according to Lawler, the film's "realistic psychology" saves it from the critic's postmodern nihilism. When Mattie falls into a snake pit after the "moment her greatest triumph" -- shooting the man who killed her father -- we are meant to understand that she has "forget[ten] the words she mouths at the film's beginning about grace being a limit to human merit or retributive justice and pride." In the context of limited human merit, we ought to learn that we are dependent not only on a "hard doctrine," but also on other men. Mattie is "rescued by Rooster, who graciously--or completely voluntarily or animated by some mixture of nobility and love and at great risk to himself--rides her to a doctor who can save her."

This is a very good analysis of the meaning of the film's events. Mattie does gratefully reappraise her protectors. And her recognition of her dependence on "the natural strength and skill graciously given her by increasingly honorable (or nonmercenary) men" is intended to fulfill the account of "true grit" that began as hearsay ("they say you have 'true grit'"). But the question that Fish asks is whether the revelation of the often beautiful and upbuilding interdependence of men somehow commutes -- "in the eyes of mortals" -- the sentence by which man is condemned to "pay for everything." Can man's action synthesize the two registers of existence that define the universe of True Grit? Fish writes:

The springs of that universe are revealed to us by the narrator-heroine Mattie in words that appear both in Charles Portis’s novel and the two films . . . the words the book and films share are these: "You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace." [...]

[T]here are two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously.

To answer the question we have to look again at this universe and at the kind of action that takes place in it. It is this aspect of Fish's review that causes James Kushiner to recall Isaiah 55:8: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord." Fish describes the way that Scripture "hangs over" the film:

This and other pieces of scripture don’t emerge from the story as a moral kernel emerges from a parable; they hang over the narrative . . . never quite touching its events and certainly not generated by them. There are no easy homiletics here, no direct line drawing from the way things seem to have turned out to the way they ultimately are. While worldly outcomes and the universe’s moral structure no doubt come together in the perspective of eternity, in the eyes of mortals they are entirely disjunct.

What does it mean for Scripture to "hang over [a] narrative" without providing a "moral kernel?" It means, first of all, that the "use" of Scripture is not intended -- by those who speak it -- to articulate the synthesis between the two registers of existence, that is, between the world of payment (death) and the world of inscrutable grace. Rather, Scripture is an authoritative tradition within the world of payment. It is an inheritance. It is something that is under the sway of time. We today pause at the profundity of each Scriptural saying as it is spoken on the screen. In pausing, we presume that our pause is a gesture of expectation by which we await a revelation that will weigh heavily on our hearts. But we are only glimpsing the echo of an authoritative word and our hearts are beginning to rise from the winnowing fan in the midst of the separating chaff. In his review, Allen Barra writes:

One of the best things about True Grit is that all of it is written in that vernacular, the speech of people who, while they may have been illiterate, were raised on readings of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, an English practically devoid of contractions and Latinate words.

In a recent interview on NPR, Philip Jenkins said this about the language of the King James Bible: "Over time that language became the language that we live and think. There's a phrase that people use which is 'language speaks us' ... through the King James it was 'Scripture speaks us.'" Our reception as viewers of the English of the King James Bible is well put by Peter Lawler in his first post on the film:

[W]e're also constantly reminded of the strange sort of cultivation that made these manly men (and woman) more able to articulate who they are than we are. The language of the film echoes that of the novel, where basically unlettered men speak with a formal and precise pagan grace. There's something civilized and even lawful in the violently state-of-nature Indian territory.

The cultivation of the characters is as strange to us as Fish's concept of physical heroism. This uncannily articulate speech is not something that has been acquired through education. It is, rather, something that has happened to man. Happening of this kind is no longer familiar to us. How can we expect, then, to comprehend the difference between the two registers? Fish has provided us with an example of this question from the original novel:

Mattie gives a fine (if terrible) example early in the novel when she imagines someone asking why her father went out of his way to help the man who promptly turned around and shot him. "He was his brother’s keeper. Does that answer your question?" Yes it does, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the reward for behaving in accord with God’s command is violent death at the hands of your brother, a question posed by the Bible’s first and defining event, and unanswered to this day.

I suppose it would be even more interesting to ask Mattie whether her father would have done the same if he knew ahead of time what would happen. If we think the answer might be "no" we do not understand Mattie's response to the actual question. Her father was his brother's keeper. Mattie is asking her interrogator: "do you even know what the word was means?" If it is true that everyone in the film is "more able to articulate who they are than we are" it is because the universe of True Grit has not yet separated "why" and "who." To answer with who is to say why. Mattie's father was his brother's keeper in accordance with a Scripture that happens in an "indifferent universe." What we today can only call an "indifferent" universe is simply one in which things happen and in which men can recognize that principle of motion as the gift of identity, as the gift of the possibility of the was. Indifference is only unacceptable when a who is not enough of a who to become a was. The melancholy with which Mattie says "time gets away from us" at the end of the film is almost categorically different from the sound of the same words on our lips. How could it be otherwise when the only principle of motion to which we think we ought to be accountable -- far from the one by which we are granted the "single honor" of death -- is the one that moves a plot! We will gladly accept all kinds of "random," indifferent events in a story or a play because the move the plot and keep it interesting.

[Apologies. I have absolutely no idea how to conclude, just as -- no doubt you will have noticed -- I have had no idea how to transition between paragraphs and quotations. Something about how Mattie's crossing of the river symbolizes the springs of the separately registered universe. And about how such a symbolization is only possible - and only different from ordinary physical heroism - because she is "leaning on everlasting arms."]

Postscript: The problem that (at least according to Fish) the Coens have recognized is that we tend to view heroism as something that is contained in the cinematic moment. We interpret the time that gets away from us as the distance between such moments. But that is not what Mattie meant. Toward the end of an otherwise odd, almost ostentatiously self-conscious review, J.L. Wall offers this remarkable interpretation of the film's final scene in which those words about time are uttered:

[Rooster Cogburn] ends his life in a Wild West Show, an old man reliving his younger days for the pleasure of paying customers. But what [role] does the man who [has killed] because it [was] easier, who [was] lazy, sloppy, and drunk, play in the tales and world of a Wild West Show? [His actual character] has no place there -- and then we realize Cogburn has spent his twilight years telling false tales about his younger self: he was a hero, a U.S. Marshall who took on gangs of murderers and thieves single-handed, who brought justice to a young girl and her family. He told the story not of Rooster Cogburn, but of John Wayne and his West. [I have edited Wall's comments for effect and apologize if I have abused his meaning. - TS]

I don't find Wall's analysis of Cogburn particularly accurate or compellingly inaccurate. Cogburn must bear the burden of Wall's effort to show that he is not one of those who would form myths out of the debris of the Civil War (the recent work of another particularly authoritative pundit has "affected the way in which [he] is willing to describe [Confederate heroes]"). Unless the novel provides information about Cogburn's Wild West Show act that verifies Wall's view, I think there is absolutely no reason to suggest that he is "telling false stories" or, if he is, that the telling of those tales is required by an egotistical need to make a myth of his past rather than by the demands of his employers and audience. Is Tom Cruise's similar character in The Last Samurai absolved from this sort of blame simply because he was a Union soldier? Of course that would be stretching the similarity. The story of John Wayne and his West may have been necessary for Cogburn's audience -- just as the repudiation of that story appears to be necessary for us -- but it is not necessary for Cogburn. However, I am extremely appreciative of Wall's insight into the framework of this epilogue.