Pat Garrett

The more I think about True Grit the better it gets. I will have to see it again some day.

I watched a couple of 1960s dusters over the weekend (more on them later) and was shocked at how good the Coen brothers' effort looks compared to them. I also reacquainted myself with some western lore I'd long forgotten.

An aside, I am often disheartened at the thought of how much smarter the teenage me was than I am now. That boy, could snare, clean and cook a rabbit. He could run a canoe through whitewater. He could sail a dinghy across the lake at night in a storm and enjoy it. He could identify a whole bunch of wildflowers, five or sex weasels (I mean six weasels of course but I'm not going to fix this now) and about twenty different kinds of rocks and minerals. He could ski forty miles in a single day. Today, I couldn't do any of those things.

That boy also knew a lot of western lore I have been reminding myself of.

Anyway, one of the things about True Grit that is now painfully obvious to me but that I was unaware of when I saw the movie last week is the very obvious, and intentional, parallel between Rooster Cogburn and Pat Garrett. The parallel was drawn in a  courtroom seen at the beginning when young Mattie goes to watch Rooster testify about some men he brought in and how they managed to get shot and killed in the process.

And what we see in a short courtroom scene is a very contracted story that parallels what happened to Pat Garrett's reputation. Rooster tells a wonderful story about how he faced the men and one of them came at him with an axe. The story is colourful and much appreciated by everyone in the courtroom and the theatre.

And then the opposing attorney gets up and exposes this story as dressing up what was little more than an ambush killing. Garrett's reputation as the killer of Billy the Kid went through a similar trajectory though not in such a short period.

The facts are murkier with Pat Garrett. We will never be able to say with certainty that Pat Garrett's version of how Billy the Kid met his death was not true. And yet, something about the story doesn't seem right.

It's funny, though, that a considerable amount of ink has been spent romanticizing Billy the Kid. This is odd because, while we might dispute how he got that way, there is no denying that Billy was a bad man. Under the law of the day, he deserved to hang. He'd unquestionably get the death penalty in many jurisdictions today. You can't, although many have tried, make him a sympathetic figure unless you do so by injecting large amounts of fantasy and disregarding certain key facts.

Historically, however, that is where the efforts have been made. Pat Garrett is usually an ambiguous figure at best in the story. If we consider Wyatt Earp's story by contrast, Earp's position was much more ambiguous than Garrett's. Garrett really campaigned on law and order and worked to deliver it. Earp was just fighting on one side of a family feud and using the law to further his and his brothers' interests.

And he clearly believed that this end justified some means that we would regard as dubious. The fascinating thing about True Grit is that it clearly takes the Garrett side of the argument. In a wild situation, you may just have to do some hard to justify things to make a good thing happen.

You might put it this way, in a morally ambiguous world where it is possible to assemble evidence so as to make everyone look equally bad or good, the way to separate the sheep from goats is to look at the end they were aiming at. We're all sinners but the road to sainthood is defined by the ultimate goal.