When I tell you what Lonely Are the Brave (1962) is about, the significance of this frame will likely become clear. Kirk Douglas plays John W. Burns, or Jack for short, a loner cowboy stubbornly holding on to the old ways (clomping around the desert on his horse, Whiskey, looking for adventure and getting in fights and stuff, I guess) while the rest of the world rapidly modernizes around him. In fact, we come to the story at a time when the modernization is more or less complete.
In the film’s first scene, Jack is rudely awoken from a comfortable nap in the rocks and dirt, using his saddle as a pillow, by the tearing sound of three planes jetting through the sky. He regards them steadily, takes a drag of his cigarette, and lets out a deep sigh. A man can’t even look to the sky in peace anymore. Then he and Whiskey set out across the sagebrush at a steady clip, only to be halted by a barbed wire fence with a sign announcing that area of desert to be off limits to anyone but the Duke City, New Mexico Water and Power Company.
What’s going on here? The once wide-open world is closing, and fast. It’s a jarring image in a Western, to be sure. But what does Jack do about it? He takes out a pair of wire cutters, snips the fence, and spurs Whiskey to trot on. The conflict is deftly laid out within the film’s first five minutes.
Jack continues along the Water and Power land, fords a river, and finds himself at the edge of town. There, he’s got to cross a highway, which Whiskey is really not into. She rears up, whinnies, and makes her reservations known.
And now we come to my frame of choice. Halfway across the four lane highway, Jack and Whiskey are almost hit by a car, whose driver shouts at them through his window. We see Whiskey rear and spin and not know what to do with herself, and then for no longer than three seconds, we see the cowboy and his horse through the driver’s side mirror, as the driver shakes his head at them and speeds on to who knows where.
This quick switch in POV, which until now has been closely trained on Jack, is really smart. For one thing, it looks cool as hell. Getting Jack and the horse (who is moving around quite a bit) centered in the mirror while the car moves away from them must have been hard to pull off. But what I like best about this frame is that it’s the only time the viewer is positioned where we might naturally be in this world. If we think of the camera as our eye here, then maybe for three seconds we are in the backseat of this car, having a normal ass day, when suddenly a cowboy rides into the middle of the road. Maybe we’re this angry guy’s kid, buckled into our carseat, at once in awe of the horse in the road and the guy on it, and scared of Daddy’s shouting voice.
It’s almost like the film is saying hey, remember who you are, you’re the square in the car, not the cowboy, idiot! That we then zip right back to Jack’s world and are not indeed trapped in the car, like we might be in real life, makes the rest of the film feel like a privilege to watch. We’re allowed (for under two hours at least) to stay in a world that’s not our own. The fact that it’s an imperiled world, already more or less untenable to live in if you’re a cowboy, gives the whole thing a sense of finality.
All it takes is a three second POV switch to place us squarely in both of the film’s conflicting worlds. We’re at once the cowboy on the horse, almost decked by a speeding car, and the person in the car, almost decking a symbol of our natural inclination to freely roam. I mean, who among us hasn’t driven deep into a national forest, down dusty, rutted roads in search of a perfect lake or mountain or just some solitude, only to be suddenly and completely foiled by private property? I know I have. I’m not being facetious; this has happened to me many times. The privatization of so much land is a great American travesty for a billion reasons, and I know John W. Burns would agree.
Of course, there is the caveat that in reality, since settler colonialists sunk their teeth into this place the only people who have really been allowed to move freely were wealthy white men who owned land, and cowboys. And cops. Feel like I’m drawing a pretty tight Venn diagram here. Except that, from the very limited number of westerns I’ve seen, the cowboys in these movies are actually pretty ACAB. And anti-border.
For instance, here’s a little gem of dialogue from when the plot really starts rolling. Turns out, Jack is heading into town to visit his good friend Paul (Michael Kane) and his wife Jerry (my queen, Gena Rowlands). But when he arrives, Jerry tells him that Paul is in jail, about to head to the penitentiary for two years for hiding, feeding, and helping undocumented Mexican immigrants find work.
“Well what’s wrong with that?” Jack asks.
“Oh, nothing. Nothing. It’s just a crime, that’s all,” Jerry says with emotion while she fries him up some ham and eggs.
Jack goes on to wax poetic about the stupidity of borders of all kinds:
“A Westerner likes open country. That means he’s got to hate fences. And the more fences there are, the more he hates them… You ever notice how many fences there are getting to be? The signs that they got on them. No hunting, no hiking, no admission, no trespass, private property, closed area, start moving, go away, get lost, drop dead… Then they got those fences that say, this side’s jail. Or that side’s the street. Or here’s Arizona, that’s Nevada. Or this is us, that’s Mexico… Now, that one between here and Mexico is the fence got Paul into trouble. He just naturally didn’t see the use of it, so he acted as if it wasn’t there. So when people sneaked across it, he just felt they were still people, so he helped them.”
So you see, in Jack’s world it’s the private land owners who’ve got it all wrong. It’s the border patrol, the law enforcers, the judges, the jailkeepers. A place is a place and people are people, and people help each other out. But the world around Jack has decided that the right to safely exist is not a foregone conclusion. Land is a commodity, imprisonment is order, and a person is either a tool that helps keep these ideas in service, or he is a nuisance. Now, after several more decades of capitalism, neoliberalism, oligarchy, fascism, whatever you want to call it, and well, you know where we’ve arrived. I won’t tell you how this movie ends, but I never said it was a happy one.
Still, I can’t help but think back to the frame that got this whole rant started, the cowboy in the car mirror. And myself as the kid in the backseat, watching him shrink. Letting the butterflies in my stomach fade and dozing off to whatever’s on the radio. Forgetting about the whole thing. Or I could unbuckle my seatbelt and open the door. I could lean into the wind. Tuck and roll, baby.