The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen Brothers revive the tradition of using the Western film genre to reflect upon contemporary America, especially its relationship to its core ideals and history. 

If one thing sets this work apart from the traditional Western it’s its wordiness. Against the reticent Westerner, here babblers abound — the poetic Buster, the crazed banker, the “dramatic reader,” the tediously compulsive prospector and trapper. This Western occupies a time of noise and verbal profusion. Like today. 

Also against the genre grain, the film opens on high comedy that unwinds into the tragic. The comic is the hero and the mortal doom the sidekick. 

Otherwise, the six episodes draw on the genre’s most familiar icons: the innocence of the white-garbed singing cowboy, the criminal individualist ennobled by vigilante “justice,” the American aspiration to and detachment from European “culture,” the settler’s (here miner’s) violation of his idealized Nature, the hazards -- and faith! -- of the wagon train’s spread of civilization through the savage wild, and finally the ambivalent “glories of civilization” revealed in a stagecoach trip to salvation. In the 1939 Stagecoach the journey went literally to Lordsburg. The new film’s parables start in America’s political Now but move toward the universal.

The eponymous opening story records the death of American innocence and power. That’s the meaning of the all-white dressed singing cowboy, freshness and innocence but preternaturally gifted both with lyric and with gun. This is the pure America that supposedly was. So this hero is just slightly off. His skills are unbelievable. His ears are too big, bending floppily under his 10-galloner.           
       But as the gunslinger myth always proves, “Can’t be top dog forever.” So here the invincible hero perforce trades his spurs for the angel’s harp and wings. The ghost of the innocence of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry — the ghost of the America that led the world in democracy, humanity and idealism —  gives way to a new, more pragmatic and corrupt power. Pause for reflection indeed, as Buster uses a mirror to take a backward shot, and again to discover his own mortality, despite his astonishing effectiveness in his world.

Buster’s nemesis, a black-garbed gunslinger, segues into the matching villain in the second story. In a setting of Beckettian simplicity and despair, he robs a crazed teller in an isolated bank on the creaking prairie. But for this model “hero” his destiny proves Absurd. His lynching is interrupted by an Indian attack, then by a bypasser, who only leads him to be lynched again for rustling. Anticipating the film’s last scene, the brief promise of a romantic salvation is curtly killed. That last black joke follows on the series of comic killings in the Indian attack and the irony of the stretched rope in the first lynching.

  The third story carries the film’s heart. It centers on a travelling entertainer, a promoter who tours the west with a pop-up show of “Dramatic Readings.” His “Meal Ticket” is a legless and armless young man who recites, rivettingly. His opening poem is Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” where a legless, armless torso discovered in the desert celebrates the global conquest of some lost king, now lost to time, obscurity and the dust. He ends on Prospero’s valedictory epilogue, “Our revels now are ended,” while his manager passes the hat — to a dramatically diminishing audience. In between come the story of Cain and Abel, Shakespeare’s sonnets 29 and 30, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg pledge that “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Right.

As Buster liked to call himself a singing bird, the reciter here is “Harrison, The Wingless Thrush.” As his Shelley bemoans “the decay of that colossal wreck,” the Shakespeare enables him to “beweep his outcast state,” yet still feel equal to the richest kings. The tour initially celebrates the frontier’s hunger for culture. But winter comes, the audiences dwindle, and that classic culture is supplanted by a conman who offers more sensational entertainment: a chicken -- "self-taught!" -- that purportedly does math. Fake Math? Harrison’s partner is gulled into paying big bucks for that chicken. He dumps the lad who embodies America’s highest aspirations, for which grasping and climbing limbs are unnecessary.

In a variation on that theme, in “All Gold Canyon” the film celebrates the glorious abundance of American nature — only to pock it with a prospector’s hunger for gold and a young criminal’s fatal attempt to rob him. The prospector switches between singing “Mother Macree” and apostrophizing “Mr Pocket,” the spirit of the gold he craves. The humans pass but the glorious nature persists, defiled but surviving its insentient plunderers. As the landscape speaks plaintive to us, a remonstrating owl amends the prospector. 

“The Girl Who Got Rattled” provides an alternative example. Here people reach out to each other. The two-man team of wagon train leaders become involved with a naive young woman when her brother, a dogmatic, headstrong failure, dies of cholera, leaving her helpless in the wild. The younger man Billy wins her hand, but the older man unwittingly leads to Alice’s death by handing her a desperation refuge from abduction and rape. Alice found her brother Gilbert’s “certainty” oppressive and inadequate to the times. She accepts Billy’s preference for “uncertainty,” the pragmatism and openness required to navigate the world’s dangers. Alice kills herself because of her premature certainty that her guardian is doomed. 

The final episode continues that moral dialectic. The stagecoach passengers exchange conflicting views of human nature. To the cynical trapper, people are all like ferrets. To the sermonizer’s wife, people can avert sin, exercise virtue and sustain selfless love., such as she expects to renew with her husband after a three-year separation. The French sophisticate takes a broader view, positing moral relativism against the others’ absolutism. 
     The audience for this debate are a couple of bounty hunters, the one a diverting storyteller (like the Coens) and the other the effective killer. The latter’s ballad of romantic betrayal makes poetic expression and storytelling instruments of justice. Significantly, it’s the cosmopolitan pragmatic who cockily closes the door on his fellows’ fate.
     Two last points about this marvellous film, released on Netflix. One is the selflessness off its cast. Stars like Liam Neeson, Tom Waites, Saul Rubinek, stud the film with persuasive performances in which the actors have disappeared entirely.
     Second, this is also a film of breathtaking beauty. Apart from the effulgence of nature, there's the Monument Valley horizon with one peak an insolent raised third finger. The canyon echoes provide the backup on the opening Roy classic, "Cool Water," itself a fantasy assurance in the parched setting. Several shots memorialize the lone rider on a vast dark plain. From the solitary silhouette to the white covered wagon train snaking through the wilderness, this Western take on existentialism starkly confronts what America has now become.