True Grit

Update: I have seen and reviewed the new film here.

No I haven't seen it. I'm tempted which is saying something as the last new release I saw in a theatre was Pride and Prejudice. It was released in 2005!

What has me especially intrigued about it is a Frank Rich column from this weekend. Something about that column linked up with some other stuff I have been treading this week. That something is nihilism. It's nihilism week here at Studiously Uncool.

I don't read Frank Rich very often because he is not only very political but also has a take-no-prisoners style about politics. But the surprise success of the remake of True Grit has him in an introspective mood and that is interesting and revealing. Rich is a polarizing writer—you either love him or hate him—but his opinions remain important because he has a special genius for reflecting and directing the opinions of hip urban people. You may think you've never read Rich but you have because his arguments and opinions have a way of reappearing in hundreds of other columns in the week following their appearance in the New York Times. There are at least three columnists at Toronto's Globe and Mail, for example, who ought to be paying him royalties.

How Frank Rich is like my mother
 He has an approach to handling unsettling events—and this movie has clearly unsettled him—that is a lot like the way my mother counseled me to follow. When I was growing up, my mother taught me to treat every good event as unprecedented: 'This is a uniquely good thing to be appreciated and cherished'. And she taught me to look for precedents whenever anything bad came along: 'Because if it has happened before and we dealt with it this shows that it is nothing to be too worried about; we can remember how the evil was overcome'.

And True Grit represents evil for Rich. It is a reactionary movie:

Yet “True Grit” was warmly received, including by the Times critic, Vincent Canby, who put it in a year-end list of bests dominated by such antiestablishment fare as “The Wild Bunch,” “Easy Rider,” “Midnight Cowboy” (that year’s Best Picture Oscar winner) and the ultimate anti-Western, Andy Warhol’s sexually transgressive “Lonesome Cowboys.” Canby described “True Grit” as “a classic frontier fable that manages to be most entertaining even when it’s being most reactionary.” 

You'll note the contrast. We have this reactionary movie and we have a bunch of others that Rich believes more truly reflected where the country was in 1969.

Before moving on, I wonder just how true that claim about the mood of the country. Because if those movies really did signal where people were at morally and culturally speaking, we should expect them to have laid down deep cultural roots. I watched High Society last night so let's take it as a random comparison point: of all the movies and TV shows Amazon sells High Society ranks at #2920.

Midnight Cowboy rates at #8809. Easy Rider is #1963. The Wild Bunch is at #5552. Lonesome Cowboys, not surprisingly is bringing up the rear at #140,864.

The original True Grit meanwhile, no doubt helped by the remake, is in the top 100 and has been for 33 days now.

So right off the top, we can write off Rich's understanding of history as factually wrong. The cultural impact of the movies he thinks better represented the moral mood society was in back in 1969 does not seem to have lasted.

It's worth noting in passing that Midnight Cowboy has the distinction of being the only X-rated picture to ever win the Oscar for best picture. Now if an X-rated movie had won for the first time last year, it would be reasonable to wonder if this represented a new trend. But if 41 years later it has not happened again, I think it's fairly safe to say that the "trend" petered out.

(By the way, other movies and TV shows old enough to count as lasting influences in the top 100 are the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice at #47, the Star Wars Trilogy at #48, Beauty and the Beast at #56, Dances With Wolves at #68, Fantasia at #70, The Wizard of Oz at #75, The Sound of Music at #85, The Little Mermaid at #90 and Gone With the Wind at #100. All of which suggests that the "dark vision" and nihilism of Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch and Lonesome Cowboys failed to take root in American culture. The only thing all those old shows in the top 100 have in common is relentless optimism.)

And what is reactionary for Rich?
Frank Rich writes for people who largely agree with him already so he doesn't stop to think much about what counts as reactionary. He just writes as if it is obvious. Whenever anyone does that it is interesting to tease out what counts as significant in this regard for them.

Here is Rich's, I'd say bang-on accurate explanation of the success of the first True Grit:

Ultimately, law, religion and domestic institutions like marriage — which Rooster failed at — had to prevail if America was to grow up. The Matties had to outlive the Roosters. And so they did. For a weary mainstream 1969 audience, and not just a reactionary one, the restoration of order in “True Grit,” inevitably to be followed by Rooster’s ride off into the sunset, was a heartening two-hour escape from the near-civil-war raging beyond the theater’s walls.

And am I the only one to think it a little funny that Rich so casually takes it for granted that "law, religion and domestic institutions like marriage" are reactionary ideas?

Rich's great hope for the future
As I wrote at the top, the rule in these contrasts is that every good thing is new and unprecedented. So what is the new hope for Rich? Why it's The Social Network by Aaron Sorkin.

Now Rich doesn't think that The Social Network portrays anything good. In his estimation, what is good about this movie is its dark portrayal of the world as it is becoming.

Talk about Two Americas. Look at “The Social Network” again after seeing “True Grit,” and you’ll see two different civilizations, as far removed from each other in ethos as Silicon Valley and Monument Valley. While “Social Network” fictionalizes Mark Zuckerberg, it mines the truth of an era — from the ability of the powerful and privileged to manipulate the system to the collapse of loyalty as a prized American virtue at the top of that economic pyramid. 

The thing that The Social Network  as understood by Frank Rich and Midnight Cowboy have in common is a kind of nihilism. You can believe in justice and truth in Rich's world but it's not going to do you a fat lot of good. The only escape from such a nihilism is something like Nietzschean superman who would, by sheer force of will (and presumably political power) impose justice on the world. I find that a rather uncertain prospect, more likely to produce crimes against humanity than justice but no one has to agree with me.

I'm no nihilist but I understand how people get there. What's the answer to nihilism? Well, there are a few and I may hit on them later this week but I thought a line in the new True Grit that seems to have particularly rankled Frank Rich was pretty darn good:

More than the first “True Grit,” the new one emphasizes Mattie’s precocious, almost obsessive preoccupation with the law. She is forever citing law-book principles, invoking lawyers and affidavits, and threatening to go to court. “You must pay for everything in this world one way or another,” says Mattie. “There is nothing free except the grace of God.” 

Those are good words to live by if you ask me.

Now I need to find a woman who is beautiful and has a devastatingly sharp mind who might be interested in going out with me for a movie followed by port and discussion of said movie.