Hartzler on True Grit

According to Keith Hartzler, writing at Anamnesis Journal, the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit is the work of "politically correct nihilists" who have "undermine[d] the novel's most important features."

[T]he Coens have made a film that is far darker than the novel it trades on . . . The context for events in True Grit is not merely physical and devoid of logic. Rather, it involves love of place, filial bonds, the bonds of friendship, the politics of Reconstruction, Christian faith, the nature of justice, and the interplay of virtue with heroism and grace with works. Evidence indicates the displacement of this context is the ultimate objective of the Coen brothers and their academic admirer.

Several responses have already been published. In the comment section, Robert Cheeks (#3) wishes the Coens had “stayed true to the book,” but still thinks it is the “best Western ever made,” and Alex Wilgus (#2) has offered an excellent defense of the film’s depiction of Christianity and grace. Peter Daniel Haworth at the Front Porch Republic and John Médaille in that comment section think Hartzler is wrong about the Coens. Carl Scott at Postmodern Conservative reminds readers of that blogs excellent previous discussions of the film; Peter Lawler argues that the differences between novel and film are due to a transition from “aristocratic, epic history” to “democratic history.” Lawler himself had followed Stanley Fish’s emphasis on “heroism of a physical kind . . . displayed by almost everyone” by pointing out the "strange sort of cultivation" that is distributed evenly throughout in the speech of illiterate men "raised on readings of Shakespeare and the King James Bible." All of this commentary shows that the Coens are doing something right -- and doing it in a medium that is limited in a way a novel (or television miniseries) is not.

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Hartzler's ire at the replacement of Southern context with events that are “merely physical and devoid of logic” is understandable -- the Coens have trodden on his family's "history of the world":

Compelling representations of Protestants and Confederates in Missouri during Reconstruction, and as Southern Democrats up to 1928, are few and far between. Charles Portis gave us one of them, preserving the sensibility characteristic of the time and place. My grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-aunts embodied a similar sensibility, rooted as they were in conservative Protestant faith, yeoman husbandry, and Appalachian folkways. I miss them, and looked forward to the Coen brothers’ adaptation as an opportunity to see, in a way, my kin on the big screen. Unfortunately . . .

And that is no small thing. We should lament the disappearance of American folkways even when the cosmopolitan principle is beautifully dramatized by an emphasis on the language of the King James Bible. However, Hartzler’s analysis both of the Coens' film and of Stanley Fish's reflection on the heroic exercise of religiosity in an "at best indifferent, and at worst hostile" universe misses the mark. Though the film is, as Hartzler has shown, different from the book, it was not the work of filmmakers blind to the presence of virtue and grace in the novel. As he ought to have gathered from Fish’s essay, the Coen brothers’ “blindness” is due to their different understanding of narrative (or their different aims with respect to narrative) and to “the way the world [and virtue and grace] looks most of the time” (see Joseph Prever at Godspy).

Fish recognized the difference between the narrative style of the Coens, on the one hand, and John Wayne, on the other, and reads that recognition back into Portis' novel, selecting those parts that justify the "liberties" the filmmakers have taken. Where John Wayne produces allegedly “great cinematic moments” that testify to the success and identity of virtue and heroism, the Coens cause their cameras to “maketh the sun shine on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 4:45). Is this latter approach “merely physical and devoid of logic?” John Médaille’s comparison is instructive:

I can compare this to the original movie. That movie was great fun, John Wayne’s parody of John Wayne. But this movie was not “fun”; this was deadly serious, and all the characters had a seriousness that they lacked in the first movie. The “true grit” in this movie was not in the bravado of the final charge, but in the heroic ride to save Mattie’s life, a ride rooted in true affection and true manliness; this combination is what constitutes true grit. This is nihilism? If so, it is a nihilism we must encourage.

The “bravado of the final charge” is an example of what Fish describes as heroism of a “physical kind . . . displayed by almost everyone.” It is not “true grit,” but the remnant of the Homeric aristeia. Something else is required for true grit. Mattie’s search is not “softened up” (Fish’s phrase) by the physical heroism of a whole world of men ready and willing to face death (a way of being that is already almost totally unfamiliar). As I wrote in my first post on the film: "[Mattie's] recognition of her dependence on 'the natural strength and skill graciously given her by increasingly honorable (or nonmercenary) men' (Lawler) is intended to fulfill the account of 'true grit' that began as hearsay ('they say you have true grit')" and that, I now add, was interrupted by what Hartzler calls the Coens' interpolation of an often inadequate Rooster Cogburn. But that interruption was designed to locate Cogburn’s true grit in “the heroic ride to save Mattie’s life, a ride rooted in true affection and true manliness.” If the Coens had simply repeated what Médaille calls "John Wayne's parody of John Wayne" -- as if that were "true grit" -- they would have put the armor of Achilles on someone who cannot be Achilles, someone who will end his life, as J.L. Wall points out, at a Wild West Show. (It would be a version of what Dr. Arbery calls "the Hector heresy.")

Similarly Mattie’s gritty, lonely maintenance of the “confidence of her convictions” is not “softened up” by the reward of success (Hartzler’s criterion for “moral ballast”). What drives the narrative of her “heroic” religiosity is something that has already happened, namely, the death of her father. Hartzler refers to his death as the “one exception” to the earthly rewards of virtue, but it is an exception that drives the plot, and an event that has the same “evenness” as every other event in that it cannot be undone. Fish’s treatment of Mattie’s view of this event is remarkable:

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.

In response to this paragraph, I wrote:

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 (imagined) 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 [as Lawler wrote] 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, today, 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 they move the plot and keep it interesting.

The Coens’ True Grit begins (Mattie’s father) and ends (Cogburn) with a death that has already happened when the narrator arrives. “Time just gets away from us.” The tragedy of this “getting away” is not just the loss of life, but also the loss of an adequate account of life.

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There is a reason so many reviews of True Grit have mentioned Cormac McCarthy, usually in the context of the Coens' adaptation of No Country for Old Men: we are, as a friend of mine has often said, in the presence of the absence of God. This presence corresponds to a kind of Old Testament narrative view of existence as exile. In a review of No Country at GodSpy, Joseph Prever wrote:

By now the Christians reading this are objecting, but they shouldn’t be; not the ones who’ve read the book of Job, or the daily news. Jesus never promised his followers freedom from suffering, and he didn’t come to abolish death or sorrow or pain (not this time around). There were those who thought so, but they were the ones who left when things got ugly.

Some might still object that the film makes evil look too powerful and goodness too puny. But that’s the way the world looks sometimes, even most of the time; and if the Coens are arguing (as I believe they are—stay with me) for the existence of something like God, some transcendent good that is valuable in itself whether or not it brings temporal success, they’re using a method at least as old as Thomas Aquinas: to argue your point most strongly, first present the strongest evidence against it.

We occupy today the narrative and imaginative space of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road whether we like it of not. The disappearance of “godspoke men” (which is also the disappearance of men who believe that men are “godspoke”) is all too possible. Sometimes our dearest wish in the face of our soothsaying dreams is that our existence be “the belly of a whale.” So, if Tennyson can make Odysseus bored with his "still hearth" and "agéd wife," the Coens can skip the politics and Appalachian folkways and focus on the appearance of religiosity in a world in which man's action is recorded in "two registers of existence." As Médaille puts it, they give us "an unstinting view of modern life, which is the geography of nowhere," and they even do it while displaying a "fondness for place and limits." This narrative style and Fish's corresponding focus on the "nowhere" of salvation -- that is, on the question of whether salvation is "accessible to mortal vision," and, in turn, whether salvation can appear in a narrative -- is, in my opinion (see my previous post on the film, "does salvation appear?"), much more profound than Hartzler’s basic claim for Christianity, virtue, and narrative:

Works avail you nothing, the Lutheran and Calvinist radicals claimed. Their tenet is not true in traditional Christianity, it is not true in life, and it is not true in the novel either, where miscreants pay for their bad behavior over and over again . . . those on the side of virtue experience success (again, with one exception—Mattie’s father). On Fish’s reading, the world provides no support for Mattie’s convictions. Yet the quest to avenge her father’s death was successful, aided by the heroism of Cogburn, Mattie herself, LaBoeuf, and Little Blackie, as well as the basic goodness of certain peripheral characters.

Alex Wilgus correctly counters:

The narrative of grace in a world of meaninglessness is not Lutheran/Calvinist, it's right out of Ecclesiastes. That war and revenge are 'a-chasing after the wind' is not a nihilistic nor non-Christian theme. Mattie's salvation is a Pauline-style roadside conversion that exacts a horrible cost. The retelling is slanted but no less Christian and certainly no less Protestant.