96 minutes, 1939, John Ford

Premise: After leaving a town in Arizona, a motley crew of characters travel across the American West.

Where to watch: Max, Criterion Channel, YouTube (with ads)

Yes, I know the material of all stories is recombined and each mythology offered by culture is circumspect and corrupted in some foundational way, but it bears repeating: elemental truths are everywhere, original, and singular each time they charge into the world and our lives. By this, I mean they are experienced originally — they are forceful, lacerating, they cost us all something very deep and ring out like phantom cries in the blue of the night. I had something pretty close to an elemental truth strike me at the end of John Ford’s Stagecoach, a truth that I detected in one remarkably startling element of his image-making: namely, how he examines, pressure-tests, and reinvents the relationship of violence and mythology. 

Let me explain how this happened. It’s the penultimate scene, when The Ringo Kid (the protagonist played by John Wayne) walks out into the main street of a town called Lordsburg. Prior to this, while a band of characters has been traveling across the country, we’ve heard about the menacing inevitability of the Plummer brothers, the oldest of whom, Luke, murdered Ringo’s father and brother. Though the Plummers don’t know Ringo is headed their direction, we sense all three of them would be eager to finish eradicating his bloodline if they found out. After a lengthy, visually rapturous, structurally itinerant journey through the American west, Ringo arrives in Lordsburg, where the Plummers catch word of his presence, civilians evacuate the streets, and the four men step into the darkness.

Over the few minutes that Ringo and the Plummers stealthily approach each other, we watch a shotgun drop from a woman’s hand, through pure blackness, into Luke Plummer’s arms; we see the Plummers’ shadows grow long against the surface of a fence; and we witness Ringo passing through a space of light two times over (which, to me, is Ford transforming the light between buildings into spotlights of history). The men walk into the blackness and are entering a blank page, a nowhere-zone, a physical representation of zero. It occurred to me here, with a magnetic and furious power, that Ford’s images are composed in the language of myth. 

The realm of mythology has already been signposted here in the scene, when a man, running into the local newspaper shop, demands the editor change the coming morning’s headline to announce Ringo’s death, before the shootout even happens. This also appears in Ford’s other images: several of his landscapes are observed from an immense, almost mythopoetic omniscience, where the mountains, roads, and plains are the primary subjects and the stagecoach is a single inkpoint bleeding on the horizon. (At one point, with a whip pan from the mountains to a group of indigenous men preparing to ambush the stagecoach, Ford makes an explicit, but not comprehensive, assertion about who has symbolic provenance over these sites of tremendous grandeur.) 

As the inevitability of the shootout gets closer, there is a dazzling wide shot where Ringo and the Plummers walk towards each other in the street, the Plummers moving towards the camera and Ringo going away. Here, Ford performs a provocative ideological synthesis: he effectively frames Ringo like the stagecoach, small, getting more distant on the horizon; as he enters the night, he is about to pass through the unknown viscera of history and become simultaneously its subject and enigma. The camera cuts to a medium shot of Ringo, he leaps to the ground, fires, then Ford summarily cuts away, so all we can hear is the ringing of gunshots and two awful screams.

If the Ringo Kid, after this spectacular scene, subsequently becomes an object of myth — a man who traveled across the country, killed three men with the same number of bullets in his chamber, and rode off into the sunset with his lover, I need to understand who the myth would belong to. I have a strange feeling the answer is the anonymized townspeople, both past and present, of Lordsburg. During the movie’s opening sequence, set in a small town in Arizona, Josiah, a doctor, and Dallas, a young sex worker, are being forcibly exiled by a group of women who claim to enforce the virtues of a supposedly “proper” and “civilized” life — they’ve marked the two as immoral and irrevocably wayward. As the two are leaving, Boone tells Dallas, with a mournful and knowing remorse, “We’re the victims of a foul disease called social prejudice, my child.” I think that here we find the architectural genesis of Ford’s genius: he transforms the narrative’s condition of possibility (the myth created by a largely wordless mass) into the visual principle of the movie’s ending. These images of Ringo and the Plummer brothers, framed against the blackness, practically disappearing into the myth of the shootout before it can happen, are almost transmitted from the future. They are what somebody could conjure in their mind as they were attempting to reconstruct and disseminate the dazzling illusion of The Ringo Kid. Ford understands that some myths are so overpowering, so potent, they make their own pictures.