Abstract
Initial and intermediary deaths serve as causes within a storyline and thus affect the future. Since the Hollywood film is based on causality through the actions of individuals, losing a character mid-story can put a terrible burden on the narrative and incur difficulties, challenges, and strains to the individual-driven causal storyline. In fact, the character most clearly affected by the death—the individual who dies—is also the one who, being dead, is no longer directly an active agent in the story. In this chapter, I focus on some of the changes a death can make so as to have an effect on the causal storylines despite, or rather exactly because of, the absence of one of the characters. In the next, fifth, chapter, I will show how death is or becomes an issue for other characters that remain alive and discuss the bonds that entangle living characters in the death of others and thus enable death to be meaningful in relation to the future.
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Notes
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, New York, Toronto, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977). §113. 68.
To follow the distinction David Bordwell borrowed from Seymour Chatman, these deaths are given as a recounting, not as an enactment (Narration in the Fiction Film [Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985], 77–78).
E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 168.
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 13.
It is similar to the resolution which Thomas Schatz finds in certain genres (which he calls genres of determinate, contested space), which reduces polar opposition by the elimination of one of the forces. See Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 32. The difference is that Schatz is interested in the resolution, whereas our concern here is with how the plot goes on and the death is meaningful in relation to the future.
Who is a former major holding the Medal of Honor, a fact which does not change his mind. See Douglas Pye, “Genre and History: Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” The Movie Book of the Western, ed. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (London: Studio Vista, 1996), 116.
One of the three types of Westerns that Will Wright identifies during the period we are dealing with is the vengeance variation (Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1977], 29).
For revenge in war films, see Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 143.
Edward Gallafent, “Four Tombstones 1946–1994,” The Movie Book of the Western, ed. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (London: Studio Vista, 1996), 302. This is in contradistinction to the “psychopathic” murders in the 1990s versions of the story, which, according to Gallafent, lack adequate logical or emotional reasons—they have “no narrative relationship to the central confrontation […] or no relationship to any discernable cause” (304).
They do end up joining Holliday and the Earps, in fact, impersonating them to confuse the Clantons, but this is not mentioned in the dialogue and modern audiences (myself included), “accustomed to having action plots spelled out more bluntly and reinforced with dialogue, often fail to notice the scheme at all” (Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 258). I will return to this incident in Chapter 5.
Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Summer 1999): 703.
Steve Neale, “Aspects of Ideology and Narrative Form in the American War Film,” Screen 32.1 (Spring 1991): 50. Actually, the lieutenant is at first only wounded, and they only later learn for certain that he has died.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 24;
see also Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals, trans. Rela Mazali and Havi Carel (New York: Zone Books, 2005), §6.001, 257.
Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1987), 9.
Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 2, Years of Maturity 1901–1919 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 468;
Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–1974), 19: 243–258. Incidentally, for Freud a woman simply lacks a penis. On desire and demand in relation to the phallus, absence, and loss or lack in Lacan, see LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 708n20.
Joan Copjec, “More! From Melodrama to Magnitude,” Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, ed. Janet Bergstrom (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999), 258.
Christine Gledhill, “Between Melodrama and Realism: Anthony Asquith’s Underground and Kind Vidor’s The Crowd,” Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, ed. Jane Gaines (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992), 152.
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 22–23.
Rick Altman, “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today,” Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, ed. Jane Gaines (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992), 26.
Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley, trans. Mary Quaintance, Ben Brewster, Diana Matias, Maureen Turim, Bertrand Augst, Hillary Radner, Nancy Huston, and Inge Pruks (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 14.
Daniel Dayan, Western Graffiti: Jeux d’images et programmation du spectateur dans La chevauchée fantastique de John Ford (Paris: Éditions Clancier-Guénaud, 1983), 12.
Daniel Dayan, Western Graffiti: Jeux d’images et programmation du spectateur dans La chevauchée fantastique de John Ford (Paris: Éditions Clancier-Guénaud, 1983), 12.
Robin Wood, “Duel in the Sun: The Destruction of an Ideological System,” The Movie Book of the Western, ed. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (London: Studio Vista, 1996), 193.
Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 1999), esp. 127–129.
While I have attempted to account for the deaths in the films, this is hardly an exhaustive analysis of the desires in the text, particularly that of Lewt. Should we desire to extend the psychoanalytic diagnoses of characters in this film, we might label Lewt a pervert. He performs “horse tricks,” which include having a half-breed watch him stick his horse’s head between his thighs from behind and then giving her the horse. Sexology, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to coin a proper Greek–Latin term for such a horse-related anal-cranial form of exhibitionism and gift giving. More specifically, he seems to be a “moral masochist” who desires nothing more than to have his father, who only orders him to enjoy, punish him. He goes about committing every unthinkable outrage, including attempted fratricide, so that his father would do so, but it is only Pearl who finally does punish him for his crimes by shooting him, initially in the thigh. He agrees with her that she “had to do it” and can finally say that he loves her since he is no longer bound exclusively to enjoy himself, but can, now, even commit to a woman who happens to play the role of a punishing father. On different forms of masochism, perversion, and their relation to gender instability—all relevant for understanding Lewt as well as Pearl—see Kaja Silverman, “Masochism and Male Subjectivity,” Male Trouble, ed. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 33–64.
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© 2010 Boaz Hagin
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Hagin, B. (2010). Melodrama and the Shaping of Desires to Come. In: Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230275072_4
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