Last night at Georgetown Law the the library sponsored the first in a series of screenings of films under the series heading "Law at the Movies." The series has been organized by my colleague Kumar Jayasuriya and sponsored by the Friends of the Law Library. Last night's inaugural film was introduced by two of the faculty who have joined an informal group interested in providing law students with some encounters between law and the film medium. Our first offering was John Ford's Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
I recalled almost nothing of the film after seeing it on television at some point in my much earlier life. Television negates any real experience of many films, but even more so back in the days when cropped versions were built around commercial advertising. So this was a treat for me, and I reflect upon it in connection with my continuing media studies (and a new project I'll announce soon via this blog).
Naomi Mezey of our faculty pointed out many features of the largest, zoomed out facets of the film: the juxtaposition of "talk and force" as well as the feminizing of the Jimmy Stewart character, the young lawyer Ransom Stoddard during his rocky start in the dusty town of Shinbone, rendered more/less "wide open" as a territory settlement by having a comic non-entity for a federal marshal. The John Wayne character, Tom Doniphon, was the kind of ambivalent hero that she described well: we watch as he and Ransom compete, in the minds of the audience, for first and second chair in this orchestration of philosophical tunes. Randy Barnett agreed generally with her remarks, which included some mention of how the coming of law, government, and civilization to this partly Hobbesian world had "costs" that are alluded to in the name of the horrific outlaw Liberty Valance and in the world of the ranchers, of which Tom is one (though he is interestingly neutral on issues that they represent in the film).
I agree partly with these remarks and offer just a few observations of my own. A student in the audience before the show stated that the film was shown in a European philosophy class, and indeed John Ford has inspired many European filmmakers artistically and in the themes of some of his many historic and great films. True, there is much here to spark further discussion of Plato and Hobbes, to name only two.
But for me a film is often foremost about the time in which it was made, in this case, 1962. Tom Doniphon represents in so many ways the plain integrity of the American myth of the West, the anti-intellectual American who still controls most of our culture, but who has a point about knowing when to back up words with action. And a handgun, of course. But who knew, in the continuing struggle of a post-war world living in an almost continuous post-colonial state of perceived emergency, that the path to be steered carefully between tribalism and the rule of law leads to suburbia? (Yes, Tom's life and plans are centered on that first house, no mortgage!) That must have been most comforting to audiences in 1962; but three cheers for Ford when the sole black resident of the town (albeit a servant) is encouraged to step up to the lunch counter- in this case, the saloon bar.
So while the town is busy becoming consumers, and the ranchers are busy becoming producers who resent regulation (don't fence me in), the deeper issue of the bully/victim is explored in the encounter between Ransom and Liberty Valance. Long before our recent school shootings, it may have become clear to some that every victim is a bully and every bully, a victim- well, perhaps. Psychopaths are an exception, as in this case. The sheer brutality of Valance and the disturbing mix of distant outrage but near tolerance of his torture techniques on the part of the townfolk, even if we consider it a tolerance engendered by fear, is done wonderfully by Ford and at time when the myth of the West was always one of sanitized violence. The silver-tipped whip hints at what most of Hollywood then would not show: that terrorism was a very real part of living in and settling the American West, even leaving aside native peoples. (The Mexicans in the film are left to be picturesque and benign, not yet a threat).
Fear of the Other and also the need to build a state solution to random, private violence indeed has a trade-off in the film as Ransom learns that government is also a tool of the tribes. He also learns that he was paradoxically both brave and a coward. So was Tom: mostly selfless in his love for Hallie, he still got his best, safest shot while Valance was distracted by Ransom in his momentary role as decoy.
Let's face it: none of us is perfectly brave or perfectly free. We are only as free as the least free person in our community, local or global.
As a final footnote it is interesting to look at the names of the characters and the principals of the film. Director John Martin Feeney (John Ford) and actor John Wayne (Marion Morrison) left the traces of Irish tribe in their birth names aside for the commodification of Hollywood, though Ford may have recanted somewhat later on. And that odd Doniphon, which sounds like Donovan: even the massive Wikipedia reveals only one other of note: Alexander William Doniphan, a soldier in the Mexican-American war who was lawyer and author of a legal code (the Kearny code) that was to have been used in an annexed Mexico and New Mexico, a kind of hybrid code, "an amalgam of Mexican, Texan and Coahuilan statutes" [with some Livingston Code of Louisiana, Missouri law mixed in](Roger D. Launius, Alexander William Doniphon, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate, 1997)at 115. But I digress- fulfilling here the codex theme of the blog as well as asking, in the end, whether we can leave the little house and garden of our minds and embrace the Other, at least by the study of comparative law? (Okay, like Ransom, I am forever the nerd).
So here is a paradoxically joyful "ouch" as we embrace John Ford's violent, beautiful film, a real "cactus rose."
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