The Water is Wide: An Analysis of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as ideal Modern Tragedy
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a motion picture that was released nationwide on October 19th, 2007. The film is a dramatic portrayal of the death of Jesse James, an outlaw celebrity mythologized during his own lifetime, which spanned thirty-four years from 1847 to 1882. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck play the titular characters. The film was photographed by Roger Deakins and directed by Andrew Dominik, who adapted the screenplay from a novel by Ron Hansen that was published in 1983.
Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher. He was born on May 5th, 1813, and died on November 11th, 1855, at forty-two years old. Believed to be the forerunner for Existentialist philosophers, his writing had a disruptive impact on the relationship between state, religion, and the populous. Two years after his death compulsory infant baptism was eradicated as a state requirement. August Strindberg and Otto Pfleiderer were among those influenced by his work in the decades immediately following his passing. A recent New York Times opinion piece by Ulrika Carlsonn affirms the enduring effectiveness of the modern Antigone conceived by Kierkegaard in The Tragic in Ancient Drama. She writes,
Life is partly a task and partly a gift, Kierkegaard wrote. Unlike a curse, a right or a genetic disease, a gift cannot be bestowed upon a person against her will. She can choose to accept or decline it. A child does not choose her parents but is offered them as gifts upon her birth, and to love them and grieve with them is to appropriate them as her kin. Love is this project of accepting a gift, cultivating a heritage, assuming another’s fate as one’s own. If freedom is the ailment, it is willful surrender to her emotions and her ties to others that is the modern Antigone’s redemption.” (2013)
Andrew Dominik is an Australian native of New Zealand. He was born on October 7th, 1967. After graduating from the Swinburne Film School in Melbourne in 1988, Dominik eventually directed his first film called Chopper, which was released in 2000. Chopper was a gangster film, which has been Dominik’s directorial genre of choice. The Austrian film institute acknowledged the movie with an award for best director, best lead actor (Eric Bana) and best supporting actor (Simon Lyndon) The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford was released in 2007. Chopper had impressed Brad Pitt, and that provided the momentum Jesse James needed to go into production. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, one for cinematography (Roger Deakins) and the other for supporting actor (Casey Affleck). Killing Them Softly, which was released in 2012, did not generate the same acclaim, despite another collaboration with Pitt. A documentary directed by Dominik chronicling songwriter Nick Cave called One More Time With Feeling has been received warmly. A review by Alonso Duralde summarizes the positive critical reaction to the film when it was released. He writes,
Epic and intimate, brutal and poignant, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford aims higher than practically any other American film this year and hits the target with aplomb. (2007)
“Human Criminal”
The following will be an argument for Jesse James as an ideal example of the type of modern tragedy described by Søren Kierkegaard in his essay The Tragic in Ancient Drama.
Gangster films often hew toward classic portrayals of criminals. It can be argued that when Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill breaks down sobbing, along with his wife Karen, (played by Lorraine Bracco) during the concluding drug raid in Goodfellas, they are expressing Kierkegaard’s interpretation of classical sorrow. Their pain is a cultural pain. The same can be said for Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone at the closing of The Godfather part III, when his daughter, played by Sofia Coppola, is accidentally shot to death on the steps of an opera house. The horror portrayed by Pacino is astonishing, albeit in the service of a disjointed film. Because his character is at the head of a defined mafia hierarchy, and Coppola’s direction during the preceding scenes was occupied by Cavalleria Rusticana as much as its own plot, the film seemed to be actively courting classical interpretations.
The mafia and classic storytelling are convenient partners. The mob can be portrayed as an insulated world where the behavior of characters is determined almost entirely by hierarchal structures. Duty takes precedence over self-reflection. The conflict in The Godfather III is its portrayal of Michael as caught between his classic obligations as the head of a crime family and his reflective desire for repentance, along with anxiety over the safety for his daughter. In this respect, the final chapter in The Godfather trilogy directly proceeds from the final image of Michael in The Godfather II, sitting by himself and contemplating his decision to execute his older brother. But despite the insight required to portray Michael as an individual caught between the old world and new at different junctures of his life, as World War II hero at the opening of Godfather I, as aging don and doting father attempting to clean his money through the church at the opening Godfather III, the trilogy never explores the alienation at the heart of criminality. This is because, like many other gangster films, insulating elements such as family, hierarchy, and duty undermine the films’ capability of portraying choice. As a result, the storytelling, unless expertly handled, threatens to be contrived. Because these movies are made and received with a modern consciousness, they can only selectively brush against classic tragic elements. It is a half-measure. Characters behave as they must, and the audience is expected to overcome their empathetic disengagement while being bludgeoned by intensity to remain absorbed with the events unfolding on the screen.
Much in the same way Kierkegaard presents a way forward for modern tragedy through the utilization of anxiety and tragic collision, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford points inward as a way forward for crime and gangster films. The cinematography by Roger Deakins often invokes Terrence Malick. Similar to a Malick production, the film utilizes voiceover narration, though dissimilar to Malick the narration is singularly omniscient opposed to a representation of the characters’ consciousness. (The narration is excerpted from the novel) The film can be described variously: as a comedy of manners, or a snapshot into the particularity of southern familial relationships entwining criminals and seemingly upstanding members of society, or a stark meditation. It analyzes suicidal depression. It is a film concerned with portraying the reality of a given situation opposed to satisfying genre requirements. In that sense, it resembles Goodfellas, the most inspired, innovative gangster film of the previous decade. But in a key divergence from Goodfellas, along with most of its other criminal brethren, Jesse James is concerned with choice. And concern is an important designation, opposed to explaining the context of, or expressing the lack of, or showing the consequences of. The choices in Jesse James are not measured morally, in the way that the argument for morality is always most effective: it is the internal effect of the choice on the character that holds importance, both before and after the choice is made. The movie doesn’t assume an inherent good or evil in the characters. This is how it rises above similar films, and can be analyzed in a Kierkegaardian context. It rebuts a conservative context: the characters are not inherently evil and hardwired to hurt people. And it rebuts a liberal context: the characters have not been mutilated by the system and subsequently imprisoned in a permanent expression of rage. They are making choices either out of a personal confusion or personal instinct. In this context, the individual choices of the character can become far more meaningful than mere devices progressing the narrative. For instance, when Henry Hill is apprehended for threatening to drop a debtor into the lion pit at Lowry Park Zoo, his choice, and the consequence of that choice, merely exist within the parameters of the film. Henry was sent to Florida because his marriage was collapsing and tasked with handling the debtor. One could derive a meaning from the sequence of events: that Henry had not properly managed his personal affairs, and it cost him from a career standpoint. But one could not extrapolate the meaning far beyond simple moral fields into more philosophical realms. The viewer never sees Henry Hill grappling with the decision as to whether they should attack the debtor, or whether he should even go to Florida. It is his duty. It is his task at hand. It is the classic hovering over a modern story like Goodfellas, due to the obligations of the mafia hierarchy. And though the character’s behavior is a realistic expression of a sociopathic mindset, the sequence does not challenge the viewer or medium with the full potential of modernity.
It can be argued that Jesse James had more creative room to roam because the portrayal of thieves relies less upon the hierarchical constraints of mafia characters. But it is in Dominik’s decision to portray Robert Ford’s idolatry and hesitation, Jesse James’s mercurial intensity, shame and compulsion, Dick Liddil’s shameless self-awareness, and Ed Miller’s doomed credulity, that make the choices of these characters feel like human choices opposed to simply criminal choices. The classic sense of hierarchical responsibility begins feeling like an albatross when weighed against the autonomy of the characters in Jesse James. It begins to feel like these other films, for all their excellence, are far too lenient on the viewer, for the viewer can say to herself, “I would never be in this type of specific hierarchical situation that required me to act violently.” Whereas in Jesse James, she may be moved to contemplate, “I have idolized somebody,” and “I have been disappointed by someone I idolized,” and “I have deeply regretted a past action,” and “I have not been able to stop myself from doing something I knew would be harmful to someone else,” and “I have overly humored the company of one who admired me,” along with other relatable human moments to be found in the film. Beyond a comparison with portrayals of criminals in other films, these are features of modernity: individuals acting upon their own agency. The results are both exhilarating and distressing, and raise questions: How does it feel for a viewer to see a criminal as understanding himself to be bad, and openly contemplating suicide? How does it feel for a viewer to see a murderer admit he’d been wrong to commit the crime because he committed the crime for fame? And it is that fact which haunts him, opposed to the crime itself? These are reflective questions that summon the modernity of the viewer in order for answers to be contemplated, whereas the hierarchal structures of other films limit such questioning, despite their achievements and capability of producing strong emotional reactions.
We can quite successfully divorce ourselves from mafia boss Michael Corleone through a consideration of personal circumstance, or simply mourn a doomed romantic figure like Carlito Brigante in Carlito’s Way (Interestingly, his rigid code is personally developed and enforced outside of a hierarchical context. Carlito is basically an independent contractor, but his personal ethics simply replaces a hierarchical structure in subverting his choice) and sure: we can observe Henry Hill like a voyeur. That might be all Goodfellas asked or intended: After all, the final shot is Henry Hill closing his front door on the viewer. Similar to the fates of its titular characters, Jesse James does not let the viewer escape with such ease.
“Reflective Outlaw”
In Greek tragedy itself, there is a transition from sorrow to pain, and I would cite Philoctetes as an example of this. In a stricter sense, this is a tragedy of suffering. But here, too, a high degree of objectivity still prevails. The Greek hero rests in his fate; his fate is unalterable; of that there can be no discussion. This element is really the component of sorrow in the pain. The first doubt with which pain really begins is this: why is this happening to me; can it not be otherwise? To be sure, Philoctetes has something that has always been striking to me… a high degree of reflection — the masterly depicted self-contradiction in his pain, in which there is such profound human truth, but still there is an objectivity that carries the whole… it is genuinely Greek when he laments that no one knows his pain. (Kierkegaard, Søren. The Tragic in Ancient Drama. Pp. 151)
No. I haven’t been acting correctly. I can’t hardly recognize myself sometimes when I’m greased. I go on journeys out of my body and look at my red hands and my mean face and I wonder about that man who’s gone so wrong. I’ve been becoming a problem to myself. — Jesse
When adulation has been born of a great sorrow, can the celebrated individual know that adulation as happiness? Can he access the sorrow to better understand and negotiate with his demons? Dominik argues that the myth of Jesse James, the southern thief who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, was created out of contingency by a traumatized country in the aftermath of the Civil War. In the opening of the movie, the weakened James’ Gang, supplemented by local goons, endeavors upon their final train robbery in Blue Cut, Missouri. Jesse slams his gun against the face of a conductor and threatens to murder him unless a safe is opened. The unflinching portrayal of the violence juxtaposes the lush cinematography preceding their boarding. It is as if the film has declared itself: the alienated characters violently refute both their beauty and the beauty of the world. Jesse does not kill the conductor after Charley Ford, Robert’s older brother, argues against the murder. The safe is light. The robbery is unsuccessful. There’s a feeling of futility conveyed through Deakins’ images of the gang returning to their hideout on horseback through night raindrops. Jesse’s older brother Frank, played by Sam Shepard, has had enough of his robbery career. He wants a life closer to normalcy. After listening to Charley’s awkward pitch about the Ford brothers joining the James gang, Frank coldly declares that there will be “no more shenanigans,” and that he would start selling shoes. These are hunted men living in quiet desperation. The dime-store novels and laudatory newspaper clippings may as well have been describing people who did not really exist.
In many movies, the external situation of Jesse James would be portrayed as the principle source of drama. He ultimately feels a need to murder his longtime associates, who are rumored to be conspiring against him on behalf of the Governor of Missouri. As consequence, Jesse becomes more reliant on Charley and Robert Ford, who are anxious, initially unquestioning newcomers. The film could have gone in several directions in terms of approach: it could have portrayed a ticking clock situation where Jesse had to find the old members of his crew before they met with the Governor. Or it could have followed Jesse as he went on the lam. Movies with these premises have been done well. But instead of focusing on a character in a situation, Dominik instead explores a more philosophical problem: Jesse James knows who he is.
And why does Jesse James know who he is? The answer is because he is an individual. And not only is he an individual: he may be the most individual man in America. He’s the legendary Jesse James. His individuality is inescapable. And his pain is insurmountable. Jesse cannot convert his pain into sorrow, because nobody else knows what it feels to be Jesse James. “It is genuinely Greek when he laments that no one knows his pain.” The tragic irony of Jesse James in this film is that he is always aware that he is not the mythologized Jesse James. He is not Robert Ford’s hero, though that is the man Robert Ford always sees. A ruthless character like Joe Pesci’s Tommy in Goodfellas was not faced with this type of reflective contradiction. Pitt’s Jesse James has committed crimes that have him praised as a hero but also force him to live under the assumed name of Thomas Howard, in constant fear of being caught by authorities. His supposedly great deeds have left him with “red hands” and a “mean face.” In Robert Ford, Jesse has a mirror in which to view the reality of his life against the fantasy. Despite the ferocity, and effectiveness, of Pesci’s performance, those characters, and that story, cannot boast these layers of reflection. The hellish reality of Jesse’s interior world is exquisitely portrayed in a nuanced scene with Garet Dillahunt’s Ed Miller:
Jesse visits the ramshackle residence of his eccentric associate, and Dillahunt plays Miller’s awed terror like an apprentice interrogated by his sorcerer. An assassination is the ostensible purpose of Jesse’s visit. But it is in subtle behavioral detail where the viewer can observe the reflective conflict occurring inside Jesse. The scene isn’t as simple as a spider devouring a fly, as it would be in a different film.
Immediately after entering his associate’s home, Jesse turns his back on Miller. Both of these men know the stakes. Jesse suspects that Miller is collaborating with a gang led by Jim Cummins to turn him into the authorities. “Well you ain’t much of a housekeeper, are ya,” Jesse remarks, while in a completely vulnerable position. Miller seems to confirm the gravity of the situation when he places his gun upon a table after Jesse turns back around. Jesse seems surprised to find Miller had been armed. Miller puts down the gun obediently.
Could this have simply been a moment of unpunished hubris for Jesse James? That argument holds weight, but is supported by less evidence than the alternative: that Jesse is feeling preemptive suicidal guilt for his impending murder of a basically harmless henchman. He’d rather Miller kill him, opposed to the other way around. But he’s also assuming a lack of fortitude within Miller to save his own life.
It is compelling to note that Jesse turns his back on the Ford brothers in a nearly identical fashion later in the story, with a far different result. In the scene with Miller, Jesse eventually stares out the window at the gray sky. The sky occupies an entire shot, like a weight that cannot be lifted. Jesse has once again put himself in a vulnerable position. He is looking up at the sky with his back turned on a deeply frightened man who was holding a gun only moments prior. Then Jesse invites Miller to dinner. This is his second invitation issued during their interaction, though the first one was not so much spoken.
The argument for Jesse turning his back on Ed Miller signaling a suicidal intention is confirmed by Dominik’s presentation of Miller’s assassination. Jesse shoots Miller in the back to dispatch him. The two had been ambling their horses through the night wilderness toward town. Jesse said Miller could continue ahead. Miller obeyed, and knew what was coming. In a literal sense, Jesse is able to do what Ed Miller could not: shoot an associate in the back. Because Ed Miller could not do what Jesse did, Jesse must find someone more like himself to fire under similar circumstances, to fulfill his suicidal wish. This explains the cryptic logic behind Jesse gifting Robert Ford the gun that his protégé would ultimately kill him with. Jesse, perhaps on a subconsciously primal level, recognizes Robert as a prospect to succeed where Ed Miller had failed.
The Ed Miller scene does require a consideration of behavioral details. But there are more overt moments of Jesse’s deep reflective pain. After carrying out Miller’s comeuppance, Jesse travels to Jim Cummins’ ranch in search of his adversary. He does not find Cummins. Instead he finds Cummins’ young cousin on the abandoned ranch, a boy named Albert who could be no older than twelve. Jesse, accompanied by a shaken Dick Liddell, proceeds to take the boy into a barn and beat him mercilessly. He wants to know where Jim is. The boy does not know. Jesse pins him and hits him. He pulls on the boy’s right ear. He threatens to tear his ear off his head. He asks repeatedly, “Where’s Jim?” The repetition has a disturbing effect: which is to alert the viewer that Jesse’s violence is a compulsion.
While they are preparing to leave the farm estate behind on their horses, Dick states plainly that he “wants out,” and that “deals like this,” make him “feel dirty.” It is an interesting comment from a usually unscrupulous character. These men don’t have a regimented code like organized criminals. Dick is using his own human instinct to clarify his boundaries of behavior. Jesse has crossed over a line. His ruthlessness is beyond the comfort of a thief. Before Dick rides away, he notices Jesse weeping onto his horse’s saddle. It is difficult for the viewer to know exactly why Jesse is crying: is he appalled by his own act of physically abusing a child? Was the abuse reminiscent of something that had happened to him? Was it the awareness that he can’t help himself from hurting defenseless people? No matter the reason, the viewer has freedom and agency to ponder why Jesse was crying after hurting the little boy. In this way, the film shows how a Kierkegaardian modern tragedy (or drama, for our more universal purposes) can imbue the viewer with the same freedom of individuality that the characters are employing. In a different film, Jesse James would not be free to cry. The simpler film existing as a mechanism to summon one or two particular emotions would inhibit the character’s potential to behave like a human. When an apparently psychopathic character like Jesse James can weep after doing something wrong, it would only be natural for a viewer to consider large ideas like shame and guilt, opposed to the far more one-dimensional response of either disconnecting or living vicariously through a film. Neither of these modes, usually prompted either by disgust or admiration, will summon complexity of thought. Complexity feeds on itself. Jesse James showing himself to be complex does not make him good. It just gives him potential. A common misconception in the film industry about the purpose of storytelling is to assume linearity in the viewer’s emotional reaction to a film. For example: The commercial interest assumes an inspiring story about overcoming odds will have an invigorating effect on the viewer. Or a film with ambitions to be artistic may want to send a message. Either way, these approaches undermine broad emotional response. Modernity is more complicated than overcoming odds to be a successful person. A successful person who overcame odds to fulfill a dream may still be miserable for reasons existing beyond their ambition. In that sense: films that wish to inspire or send a serious message often have simplistic characters lacking interiority. Because the film has a specific goal for what it wants the viewer to feel, opposed to crafting fictional characters who are capable of demonstrating feeling. And by feeling we refer to modern feeling, which is an intricate web of emotion requiring complicated characterization. As referenced above, Jesse James’ subconscious plan to have Robert Ford kill him could never work if the film wanted to send a specific message. The characters in those movies are incapable of truly weeping.
“The Water is Wide”
It is, therefore, surely a misunderstanding of the tragic when our age endeavors to have everything fateful transubstantiate itself into individuality and subjectivity. We want to know nothing about the hero’s past; we load his whole life upon his shoulders as his own deed, make him accountable for everything, but in doing so we transform his esthetic guilt into ethical guilt. In this way, the tragic hero becomes bad…(Pp. 144)
Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator. (Pp. 149)
The actual assassination of Jesse James by Robert Ford as portrayed in the film is reflectively modern. The murder scene, and the aftermath of the assassination, is driven by the characters’ self-awareness. The film’s closing sentiments are complex enough to seem open-ended while making a definitive statement in their own right. All these attributes would qualify as decidedly Kierkegaardian. But the film does not simply rise to that level and confidently settle. It goes further than even Kierkegaard had himself while composing his original thesis. Because while the philosopher made plenty of clear delineations between the characteristics of modernity and classics, he did not quite convey the rationale for a character being separated from sorrow beyond a broad allusion to cultural expectations for drama. He provides examples of the modern individual’s fragmentary experience and outlook without offering a motive for the disconnection. The writing is mathematical in that sense. The fragmentation is a sum total as the result of a process. There’s no better example of the methodology than on page 149 of The Tragic, which features Kierkegaard’s witty harangue detailing the modern person’s confused value expectations: expecting to be “edified in a theater, esthetically stimulated in a church,” and on. But despite the insight of these opinions, they lack the quality of a consideration of conscious change. This may seem like an ironic observation, given Kierkegaard’s reputation as a philosopher of choice. But I believe he stopped short in this particular instance of considering the insistence of an individual to be swept away from a communal experience of a cathartic emotion like sorrow. The modern individual as desperately comedic figure furthered Kierkegaard’s point, but may have obscured the complex nature of our social disconnect.
It seems inarguable that the modern person, as a rule, would prefer more universal connection with a community, a less fragmented sense of herself and experiences, and a total transcendence from an idea of responsibility that punishes people for having an identity. It seems to be a Catch 22. We evolve to the point of being individualized, able to bear the weight for our fate. But we yearn for an expression of ourselves as simply one of many. A part of the chorus opposed to conscious creation. But how to describe that which keeps us from communing between these poles to gain affirmation from modernity, opposed to fear and emptiness? Kierkegaard seems to leave us confusedly breakdancing upon the altar because we should already know why we ended up that way. (And perhaps he figured Hegel already explained it adequately)
But I believe Jesse James shows how individuals interact with culture, and culture interacts with individuals, to form the principle for the utterly baffled, emotionally wounded modern. (And in the case of the principal characters in this film, these wounds are terminal) In this sense, perhaps we can achieve a better understanding of why the modern person is suffering, opposed to simply pointing out the ineffectiveness of their thrashing. In this way, I feel Jesse James is truly doing the significant work of modern art, which is to take strong theses such as The Tragedy and illuminate them further thanks to the utilization of our naturally more complex contemporary consciousness. To further this point, I will call upon another modern thinker. The following will be a reflection of ideas put forward in the recent documentary film I Am Not Your Negro.
James Baldwin seemed insistent that the white person’s preoccupation with innocence in the midst of searing social strife represented a conscious choice to negate threatening information from gaining traction in their consciousness. But this is not to say that the awareness of injustice and resultant strife did not exist within them: it was (and arguably continues to be) simply suppressed. Baldwin argued that this technique renders both the suppression, and this idea of innocence, ripe for sharp critique by those excluded from their assuring warmth. But just as important: for the people making the choice to suppress, their lives are compromised by a fraudulence that must be addressed.
It is my opinion that Baldwin was not recommending violent reprisal to counter internal choices made by people with their own complex realities to deal with on a daily basis. I’d also like to take a moment to convey a difference between a suppressor and oppressor. Aside from the obvious implications of these words, I’d argue that suppressors have a far more active hand in the formation of daily reality, and it is their situation in relation to the tragic individual that is being explored herein.
By simply describing these choices and motives, Baldwin was exposing the violence seemingly inherent and unavoidable within the American consciousness. The conscious decision to suppress knowledge of the other’s experience is a violent decision, because it drains truth from life. But: to be embroiled by a constant awareness of injustice is also violent decision, for obvious reasons having to do with alienation, disillusion, and the possibility of complete mental breakdown.
So, my fellow American: the tension, pressure, mental and physical violence: all of these seem to be undeniable. How can these things be coped with except through fantasy? This fantasy will be about ourselves, but it is about our country too: though signifying a difference between the two may be read as pretty meaningless: we are America.
America is not a coincidence, a happenstance. Imagine the end of a great Civil War where hundreds of thousands are dead. The President of the United States has been assassinated. The old world was brutally evil, so a new one is being brutally constructed. How could the individual cope? It must have been like witnessing your own death. And nobody could escape. The great city of the North, New York, barely survived a draft day riot. The New York that resulted will probably never acknowledge the conditions, implications, and violence defining the death of the old.
An American myth must be made to materialize. American Myths are particular. They hit a trifecta. They can remind us that things really weren’t how they were, and that we really aren’t what we are, and that the future will be what it never could. Jesse James as heroic thief who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor served these three purposes quite effectively:
1. Things really weren’t how they were: The South had a solely moral obligation to protect their land and wealth from the State.
2. We aren’t really what we are: Slave-owners and supporters of slave owners.
3. The Future will be what it never could: A restoration of pre-Civil War Southern pride and autonomy.
It all naturally leads to a question: how does the reflective nature of the assassination scene in the film fulfill a deepening of Kierkegaard’s ideas about the fragmented modern individual?
To answer: it is my argument that Jesse James is not only interacting with his killer during his final moments, but, similar to every contemporary person challenged by modernity, he is interacting with culture. It is guiding his decisions despite the fact that culture itself is blind, but to specifically further Kierkegaard’s thought on the topic: it is blind because it wants to be blind. It desires blindness. It does not want to see the world or itself. Instead, like the cleverest of beasts, it instead coerces individuals to do the very things that it refuses: the individual will open their eyes even if they desire blindness. And even if they wish not to see what they see, what they see will pressure them. The individual will be revealed to themselves, and perhaps to a select few others. But the most devilish aspect of this modern apparatus: the more a particular individual threatens to make culture see itself, the more intensely these processes shall be inflicted upon them. Here is the only method the system can employ for balance. Jesse James will feel more intensely than any human should feel: because he must bear the weight of his identity. Though he draws a surface comfort from Robert’s idolatry, (a less important reason for keeping him around), Jesse is perfectly aware that things were actually how they were, people, including him, are what they are, and the future will not ever be what it is incapable of being. Considering I have mentioned the irony of Jesse’s awareness already, it is time to take the point a step further.
The water is wide
I cannot get o’er
No wings have I
No wings have I to-o fly
Give me a boat
That will carry two
We both shall row,
my friend and I.
As I look out
Across the sea
A Bright horizon beckons me
And I am called to do my best
And be the most
That I can be.
(The Water is Wide, Traditional)
Jesse stares out his living room window. He’s looking out the window just like he looked out Ed Miller’s window. He sees his daughter. She’s across the front yard. She’s speaking the words to The Water Is Wide. Jesse stares at his daughter. He seems estranged from the love he feels from her. He feels the love. But its almost like this love should not belong to him. It is an accident of nature. It is nothing he has earned. He has red hands and a mean face. Jesse gazes away from her. He sees an abandoned shoe. That reminds him of his brother Frank. Frank left him because he didn’t want to be a thief anymore. He not only wanted to be a shoe salesman, he could be a shoe salesman. The shoe is empty. The shoe fit Frank, but it did not fit Jesse. That is because Jesse can’t stop himself from being bad: he can’t stop himself from tearing at the earlobes of children, from shooting people he called friends, from holding a knife to Robert Ford’s neck while recollecting a wartime memory of betraying another naïve boy. Jesse takes his eyes away from that empty shoe and remarks:
“Picture’s dusty.”
He is not hopeless simply because he is modern. He is not suicidal simply because he knows himself to be morally reprehensible. The film expands the notion of a modern tragedy, just as Kierkegaard began to define it with his Antigone. This is because his reflective dilemma and subsequent hopelessness are occurring on multiple levels.
The water is wide: For Jesse, the water is wide: He cannot get o’er: He cannot be the man Frank is, able to stop himself. He cannot be the loving father who ceases his criminal lifestyle for his children. There is the empty shoe and his daughter playing alone. This is what he sees the last time he looks outside his window. He knows he can’t be better. But to end the thesis here would be a betrayal of analyzing the film in a truly modern context, because this assumes total individual guilt on the part of Jesse James for being Jesse James. The water is wide for more than Jesse James.
The water is wide: For America, the water is wide. America cannot get o’er. America cannot stop itself from romanticizing and mythologizing its past instead of confronting the violence. America cannot allow individuals to communicate with their sense of sorrow because that will spark a different level of awareness of the individual: beyond the hero worship of a Jesse James, and the scapegoating of a Robert Ford. Instead there must be copies: another Jesse James, and another Robert Ford: another convenient hero and coward. Kierkegaard’s aim in his prototype modern tragedy may not have been as audacious as synthesizing modern consciousness with a classic (softer) sense of empathy to revolutionize our capacity for understanding the self and others, but using the text to analyze the cultural situation of a character leads me to consider such possibilities. In this regard, I may be bold enough myself to declare America, beyond just the art and into its heart, as negligent in responding to the demands of modernity. When we have such works as Jesse James that progress the story of modernity, as it were, there should exist hope, and possibly even expectation, that America will awake from myth and fully venture into the modern. (And that also means integrating the softness of sorrow, opposed to overlooking its importance)
I do not necessarily propose that the Jesse James portrayed in the film could articulate his dilemma: his awareness of hopelessness on two distinct levels: the hopelessness of his vanity, violent compulsions, and selfishness. The hopelessness of a country alienating himself from his own body, to the point where he longed for the astral plane and compared returning his body to “spooning (his) own puke.” The awareness that the same way things would never improve for him on a moral level, so too was he indicative of his culture. But I would argue, in his reflective state as especially portrayed during the film’s opening moments, Jesse James knew he was someone, and that he was alone.
The Collision
Generally, there ought to be somewhat more discrimination about what is called a tragic collision. The more sympathetic the colliding forces are, the more profound but also the more alike they are, the more momentous the collision… what to him is of supreme importance is to convince her of how deeply he loves her, indeed, that his life is over if he must give up her love… with every protestation of love, he increases her pain; with every sigh, he plunges the arrow of grief deeper and deeper into her heart…” (Pp. 162, 163, 164)
The relationship between Robert Ford and Jesse James seems to exemplify Kierkegaard’s notion of a tragic collision. It is fascinating to consider these collisions: it forces the mind to twist upon itself. To work through the notion that someone giving something to another with loving intention could actually hurt them. These are the most sensitive and subtle considerations for a writer to make, for an actor to portray, for a director to capture. In the collisions, we can find a template for the expression of a complicated modern relationship. We take for granted that our emotional reactions to interactions in life will be complicated. But we do not necessarily expect drama to show this turmoil. Because it is highly difficult to artistically express an internal movement of consciousness. I will attempt to outline the collision between Jesse and Robert with the slightest finesse.
Jesse gives to Robert: A role model.
The role model destroys Robert because: His fantasies of criminality need to be corrected opposed to affirmed.
Robert gives to Jesse: Idolatry
The idolatry destroys Jesse because: He should not be humoring Robert’s naïve notions of his life and experiences. Jesse knows better, like his brother Frank, but unlike Frank, he is having issues evolving beyond the notion of himself as an outlaw. His relationship with Frank is difficult, and it is telling that when his older brother leaves, Robert immediately takes his place in the household. Jesse is opting for an easier companion than his brother, who is actually challenging him.
Despite giving these roles to the other as a gesture of friendship, both characters fray against both the assignments and each other. Robert begins questioning his idolatry, so that it turns on itself: he begins to hate and fear his hero. While Jesse alternates between gifting Robert a gun, and threatening him with a knife, seeming disturbed by his own inability to account for the purpose of the relationship on a practical level. Ultimately, one may argue in the Kierkegaardian context that Robert never pulls the arrow of idolatry out of his own chest, because he decides to embody the heroic Jesse of his imagination even while shooting the actual human Jesse. And because Jesse seems to make the decision to die at the hand of Robert, he tears the arrow from his chest at the moment of abdicating the pain of mentoring his own warped image.
Sources:
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Tragic in Ancient Drama. Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press. 1987.
The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford. Andrew Dominik. Warner Bros. 2007. Theatrical Release.
The Godfather Trilogy. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures. 1972–1990. Theatrical Release.
Goodfellas. Martin Scorsese. Warner Bros. 1990. Theatrical Release.
Carlito’s Way. Brian De Palma. Universal Pictures. 1993. Theatrical release.
I am Not Your Negro. Raoul Peck. Magnolia Pictures. 2016. Theatrical release.
Traditional. The Water is Wide. Unknown release date.
Carlsson, Ulrika. Kierkegaard’s Anitgone. New York Times. Opinionator. May 5th, 2013)
Duralde, Alonso. Assassination of Jesse James Hits the Target. Today.com/popculture. September 18th, 2007
