The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

As a kid growing up in Arizona, I was not a huge fan of cowboys and the Old West and the whole western genre of stories. I resisted the appeal of that mythology because I was surrounded by it. My town, which had been the territorial capital of Arizona, had its annual Frontier Days and Territorial Days and The World’s Oldest Rodeo. My young rebellious spirit wanted to like something different, not something that the rest of my town seemed obsessed with. And yet some of the appeal did sink in, in part due to my older brother’s influence. He loved cowboys, and since I looked up to him, I started getting into some of those as well. But my early images of westerns include Emilio Estevez and Kevin Costner rather than John Wayne and Gary Cooper. It wasn’t until later in life that I went back and started watching some of the old classics. And when I finally did, I was stunned by how good many of them are. I had largely dismissed the genre as cheesy, sentimental, and simplistic. But many are truly great films with complex themes.

I just watched for the first time The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a John Ford western starring James Stewart and John Wayne. This is a great example of what the western genre is capable of. The basic story is about senator Ransom “Rans” Stoddard (James Stewart) who returns from Washington to the small western town of Shinbone to attend the funeral of an old friend. The local newspaperman is curious who would bring such a prominent man all that way, and the name Tom Doniphon is unfamiliar to him. So Rans begins telling the tale of how he first came to Shinbone. The movie flashes back to decades earlier. We meet young Rans, an optimistic lawyer headed west; Tom (John Wayne), a gruff but kindhearted homesteader; the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin); and Hallie, the woman both Tom and Rans desire, who, as we’ve already seen in the opening, will eventually become Rans’s wife. The basic structure works like many other movies, among them Citizen Kane, with initial questions presented that we expect to see revealed through the flashback. We want to know who shot the gunslinger Liberty Valance and how bookish Rans rather than tough Tom ended up marrying Hallie. But those issues of plot are not what make this film special. It’s the exploration of significant themes that make the movie a standout.

I was struck early on by the names Ransom and Liberty. Clearly liberty is a significant ideal when packing up and moving out to the frontier. A major conflict in the story comes from the different ideals of the townsfolk, who want their territory to become a state, and the ranchers, who want no outside intrusion and regulation of their free range. The townsfolk want law and order, which could mean sacrificing some personal liberties for the greater good of all. The ranchers want total freedom, which can result in anarchy. Representing that anarchy is Liberty Valance, who, along with being a thief and killer, is also a hired thug sent to Shinbone to scare the townspeople into voting the way the ranchers want. But what about Ransom? What does his name signify? Ransom wants to use the law to prosecute Liberty Valance, but Tom insists that the only way to deal with the outlaw is by being quick with a gun. So what has to be ransomed, paid, sacrificed? Is it possible to have liberty without ransoming some principles? Is liberty itself worth sacrificing?

These ideas are hit upon several times in different ways. For instance, Rans starts a school to teach the townsfolk to read and write and understand the laws of the country in which they live. The opening words of the Declaration of Independence are recited by Pompey, Shinbone’s sole African American, who is not allowed to drink with the white men at the saloon. Pompey struggles to recite the words, forgetting the part about all men being created equal, until Rans reminds him. And the remaining lines about unalienable rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are left unspoken to resonate silently with the audience.

There’s much more, too, in this film. Ideas about the role of the press in our democracy and the ways politics can become a sideshow are explored. The film even touches on the end of the Old West, the way that time has been misrepresented and misremembered, ideas that are prominently explored in later western films like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

I could continue on with interesting themes this film explores, and I’m sure this is one that will resonate in my head for days to come. The bottom line is this: if you’re like me and have in the past dismissed westerns, give them another try. Their quality and complexity might surprise you.

The Social Network

I recently watched two films with plots centered on Facebook: The Social Network and Catfish. These two movies are certainly of our current time. They tell about the world as it is today. I was planning on writing one post about both films, but once I started, I realized I had too many thoughts bouncing around my head about The Social Network, so Catfish will have to wait. And even as I finish this post, I realize I have only scratched the surface of what I could say about The Social Network. I guess this is why I love movies so much. The great ones get my mind spinning.

It is interesting to think about how a movie that is so much about the present will hold up in the future. The Social Network was a frontrunner for the best picture Oscar this past year, which isn’t necessarily an indicator of a film’s lasting artistic merit, but I think The Social Network will still be recognized as a great film years from now.

When I saw it in the theater last fall, I thought it was gripping, which isn’t the adjective you might expect about a movie that is made up of scenes of deposition rooms and scenes of guys sitting at computers. But this movie absolutely holds up as entertainment. The script is tight, the dialogue buzzes with energy, the performances are successful, the direction and cinematography never left me bored. Just across the board, this was first rate. But when I watched it a second time a couple days ago and stopped to think more about the film as an artifact of our age and how it fits with other films and stories of other times, that is when the movie really stands out to me as a major achievement of the art form.

The movie that The Social Network most reminds me of is Citizen Kane. Both are stories about a man’s rise to wealth and prominence as the head of a major media outlet told through the testimony of those who knew him. In the case of Citizen Kane, the testimony comes from interviews conducted after Kane’s death while in The Social Network, the interviews are legal depositions of those who are suing Mark Zuckerberg. One of the big differences, of course, is that Kane dies at the beginning of the film and Zuckerberg is alive throughout. Furthermore, Kane lives a whole life, which we see from childhood through death, but we only see a period of a few years in Zuckerberg’s young life. The other major difference is certainly the medium that these two men work in. Kane was a newspaper tycoon; Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook. When I sift through all of these differences, I come to a conclusion: with the change in technology, the pace of life has altered.

Back when newspapers were a major influence on the world, the traditional story of a “great man” was the story of years, decades, an entire life. Now that newspapers are out of date as soon as they are printed and we rely on instant information constantly uploading on screens in front of us, the “great man” story takes place within the period of a few years. The pace of our lives has accelerated.

There is a term, which I have heard attributed to Hitchcock: the MacGuffin. This is the thing that sets a plot in motion. It’s the Maltese Falcon that everybody wants to possess, the bomb that the hero and villain both want to control. Citizen Kane has Rosebud at its center. The Social Network has Facebook itself and the billions of dollars generated from Facebook, but another possible view The Social Network’s MacGuffin is the girl who dumps Zuckerberg in the opening scene. She represents his hopes and dreams. At the heart of his story is a lonely guy who wants to get a girl to notice him. He wants friends, acceptance. He wants to be important and recognized. He wants comfort. In these ways, he is very much like Kane.

But here’s where the aspect of life moving at an accelerated pace becomes very interesting. Kane was about an entire life from birth to death. The Social Network is about a young man in his early twenties. Kane was on his deathbed full of regret, whispering “Rosebud.” The Social Network ends with Zuckerberg reflecting back on what he has lost. It was too late for Kane to change, but Mark Zuckerberg is not yet thirty. In this way, I see The Social Network as a much more hopeful film. Zuckerberg doesn’t have to die with regret. He still has the possibility open of truly becoming a great man.