Robert B. Ray
The Thematic Paradigm
The dominant tradition of American cinema consistently found ways to overcome
dichotomies. Often, the movies' reconciliatory pattern concentrated on a single character
magically embodying diametrically opposite traits. A sensitive violinist was also a tough boxer
(Golden Boy); a boxer was a gentle man who cared for pigeons (On the Waterfront). A gangster
became a coward because he was brave (Angels with Dirty Faces); a soldier became brave
because he was a coward (Lives of a Bengal Lancer). A war hero was a former pacifist (Sergeant
York); a pacifist was a former war hero (Billy Jack). The ideal was a kind of inclusiveness that
would permit all decisions to be undertaken with the knowledge that the alternative was equally
available. The attractiveness of Destry's refusal to use guns (Destry Rides Again) depended on the tacit understanding that he could shoot with the best of them, Katharine Hepburn's and Claudette
Colbert's revolts against conventionality (Holiday, It Happened One Night) on their status as
aristocrats.
Such two-sided characters seemed particularly designed to appeal to a collective
American imagination steeped in myths of inclusiveness. Indeed, in creating such characters,
classic Hollywood had connected with what Erik Erikson has described as the fundamental
American psychological pattern:
The functioning American, as the heir of a history of extreme contrasts and
abrupt changes, bases his final ego identity on some tentative combination of dynamic polarities such as migratory and sedentary, individualistic and
standardized, competitive and co-operative, pious and free-thinking, responsible
and cynical, etc....
To leave his choices open, the American, on the whole, lives with two sets of
“truths.”
The movies traded on one opposition in particular, American culture's traditional
dichotomy of individual and community that had generated the most significant pair of
competing myths: the outlaw hero and the official hero. Embodied in the adventurer, explorer,
gunfighter, wanderer, and loner, the outlaw hero stood for that part of the American imagination valuing self-determination and freedom from entanglements. By contrast, the official hero,
normally portrayed as a teacher, lawyer, politician, farmer, or family man, represented the
American belief in collective action, and the objective legal process that superseded private
notions of right and wrong. While the outlaw hero found incarnations in the mythic figures of
Davy Crockett, Jesse James, Huck Finn, and all of Leslie Fiedler's "Good Bad Boys" and Daniel
Boorstin's "ringtailed roarers," the official hero developed around legends associated with
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Lee, and other "Good Good Boys."
An extraordinary amount of the traditional American mythology adopted by Classic
Hollywood derived from the variations worked by American ideology around this opposition of
natural man versus civilized man. To the extent that these variations constituted the main tendency of American literature and legends, Hollywood, in relying on this mythology,
committed itself to becoming what Robert Bresson has called "the Cinema." A brief description
of the competing values associated with this outlaw hero-official hero opposition will begin to
suggest its pervasiveness in traditional American culture.
1. Aging: The attractiveness of the outlaw hero's childishness and propensity to whims,
tantrums, and emotional decisions derived from America's cult of childhood. Fiedler observedthat American literature celebrated "the notion that a mere falling short of adulthood is a guarantee
of insight and even innocence." From Huck to Holden Caulfield, children in American
literature were privileged, existing beyond society's confining rules. Often, they set the plot in
motion (e.g., Intruder in the Dust, To Kill a Mockingbird), acting for the adults encumbered by daily affairs. As Fiedler also pointed out, this image of childhood "has impinged upon adult life
itself, has become a 'career' like everything else in America," generating stories like On the Road
or Easy Rider in which adults try desperately to postpone responsibilities by clinging to
adolescent lifestyles.
While the outlaw heroes represented a flight from maturity, the official heroes embodied
the best attributes of adulthood: sound reasoning and judgment, wisdom and sympathy based on
experience. Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack constituted this opposing
tradition's basic texts, persuasive enough to appeal even to outsiders (The Great Gatsby). Despite
the legends surrounding Franklin and the other Founding Fathers, however, the scarcity of mature
heroes in American literature and mythology indicated American ideology's fundamental preference for youth, a quality that came to be associated with the country itself. Indeed,
American stories often distorted the stock figure of the Wise Old Man, portraying him as mad
(Ahab), useless (Rip Van Winkle), or evil (the Godfather).
2. Society and Women: The outlaw hero's distrust of civilization, typically represented by
women and marriage, constituted a stock motif in American mythology. In his Studies in Classic
American Literature, D. H. Lawrence detected the recurring pattern of flight, observing that the
Founding Fathers had come to America "largely to get away.... Away from what? In the long run,
away from themselves. Away from everything." Sometimes, these heroes undertook this flight
alone (Thoreau, Catcher in the Rye); more often, they joined ranks with other men: Huck with
Jim, Ishmael with Queequeg, Jake Barnes with Bill Gorton. Women were avoided as representing the very entanglements this tradition sought to escape: society, the "settled life,"
confining responsibilities. The outlaw hero sought only uncompromising relationships, involving
either a "bad" woman (whose morals deprived her of all rights to entangling domesticity) or other
males (who themselves remained independent). Even the "bad" woman posed a threat, since
marriage often uncovered the clinging "good" girl underneath. Typically, therefore, American
stories avoided this problem by killing off the "bad" woman before the marriage could transpire
(Destry Rides Again, The Big Heat, The Far Country). Subsequently, within the all-male group,
women became taboo, except as the objects of lust.
The exceptional extent of American outlaw legends suggests an ideological anxiety about
civilized life. Often, that anxiety took shape as a romanticizing of the dispossessed, as in the Beat Generation's cult of the bum, or the characters of Huck and "Thoreau," who worked to remain
idle, unemployed, and unattached. A passage from Jerzy Kosinski's Steps demonstrated the
extreme modern version of this romanticizing:
I envied those [the poor and the criminals] who lived here and seemed so free,
having nothing to regret and nothing to look forward to. In the world of birth
certificates, medical examinations, punch cards, and computers, in the world of
telephone books, passports, bank accounts, insurance plans, wills, credit cards,
pensions, mortgages and loans, they lived unattached.
In contrast to the outlaw heroes, the official heroes were preeminently worldly,
comfortable in society, and willing to undertake even those public duties demanding personal
sacrifice. Political figures, particularly Washington and Lincoln, provided the principal examples
of this tradition, but images of family also persisted in popular literature from Little Women to
Life with Father and Cheaper by the Dozen. The most crucial figure in this tradition, however,
was Horatio Alger, whose heroes' ambition provided the complement to Huck's disinterest.
Alger's characters subscribed fully to the codes of civilization, devoting themselves to proper
dress, manners, and behavior, and the attainment of the very things despised by the opposing
tradition: the settled life and respectability.
3. Politics and the Law: Writing about "The Philosophical Approach of the Americans," Tocqueville noted "a general distaste for accepting any man's word as proof of anything." That
distaste took shape as a traditional distrust of politics as collective activity, and of ideology as
that activity's rationale. Such a disavowal of ideology was, of course, itself ideological, a tactic
for discouraging systematic political intervention in a nineteenth-century America whose
political and economic power remained in the hands of a privileged few. Tocqueville himself
noted the results of this mythology of individualism which "disposes each citizen to isolate
himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this
little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.”
This hostility toward political solutions manifested itself further in an ambivalence about
the law. The outlaw mythology portrayed the law, the sum of society's standards, as a collective, impersonal ideology imposed on the individual from without. Thus, the law represented the very
thing this mythology sought to avoid. In its place, this tradition offered a natural law discovered
intuitively by each man. As Tocqueville observed, Americans wanted "To escape from imposed
systems . . . to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things . . . in most
mental operations each American relies on individual effort and judgment." This sense of the
law's inadequacy to needs detectable only by the heart generated a rich tradition of legends
celebrating legal defiance in the name of some "natural" standard: Thoreau went to jail rather
than pay taxes, Huck helped Jim (legally a slave) to escape, Billy the Kid murdered the sheriff's
posse that had ambushed his boss, Hester Prynne resisted the community's sexual mores. This
mythology transformed all outlaws into Robin Hoods, who "correct" socially unjust laws (Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, John Wesley Harding). Furthermore, by customarily portraying the
law as the tool of villains (who used it to revoke mining claims, foreclose on mortgages, and
disallow election results—all on legal technicalities), this mythology betrayed a profound
pessimism about the individual's access to the legal system.
If the outlaw hero's motto was "I don't know what the law says, but I do know what's right
and wrong," the official hero's was "We are a nation of laws, not of men," or "No man can place
himself above the law." To the outlaw hero's insistence on private standards of right and wrong,
the official hero offered the admonition, "You cannot take the law into your own hands." Often,
these official heroes were lawyers or politicians, at times (as with Washington and Lincoln), even
the executors of the legal system itself. The values accompanying such heroes modified the assurance of Crockett's advice, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead."
In sum, the values associated with these two different sets of heroes contrasted markedly.
Clearly, too, each tradition had its good and bad points. If the extreme individualism of the
outlaw hero always verged on selfishness, the respectability of the official hero always threatened
to involve either blandness or repression. If the outlaw tradition promised adventure and freedom, it also offered danger and loneliness. If the official tradition promised safety and
comfort, it also offered entanglements and boredom.
The evident contradiction between these heroes provoked Daniel Boorstin's observation
that "Never did a more incongruous pair than Davy Crockett and George Washington live
together in a national Valhalla." And yet, as Boorstin admits, "both Crockett and Washington were popular heroes, and both emerged into legendary fame during the first half of the 19th
century."
The parallel existence of these two contradictory traditions evinced the general pattern of
American mythology: the denial of the necessity for choice. In fact, this mythology often
portrayed situations requiring decision as temporary aberrations from American life's normal
course. By discouraging commitment to any single set of values, this mythology fostered an
ideology of improvisation, individualism, and ad hoc solutions for problems depicted as crises.
....Because the reluctant hero story was clearly the basis of the Western, American
literature's repeated use of it prompted Leslie Fiedler to call the classic American novels
210 "disguised westerns." In the movies, too, this story appeared in every genre: in Westerns, of
course (with Shane its most schematic articulation), but also in gangster movies (Angels with
Dirty Faces, Key Largo), musicals (Swing Time), detective stories (The Thin Man), war films
(Air Force), screwball comedy (The Philadelphia Story), "problem pictures" (On the Waterfront),
and even science fiction (the Han Solo character in Star Wars). Gone with the Wind, in fact, had
two selfish heroes who came around at the last moment, Scarlett (taking care of Melanie) and
Rhett (running the Union blockade), incompatible only because they were so much alike. The
natural culmination of this pattern, perfected by Hollywood in the 1930s and early 1940s, was
Casablanca. Its version of the outlaw hero—official hero struggle (Rick versus Laszlo) proved
stunningly effective, its resolution (their collaboration on the war effort) the prototypical Hollywood ending.
The reluctant hero story's tendency to minimize the official hero's role (by making him
dependent on the outsider's intervention) suggested an imbalance basic to the American
mythology: Despite the existence of both heroes, the national ideology clearly preferred the
outlaw. This ideology strove to make that figure's origins seem spontaneous, concealing the calculated, commercial efforts behind the mythologizing of typical examples like Billy the Kid
and Davy Crockett. Its willingness, on the other hand, to allow the official hero's traces to show
enables Daniel Boorstin to observe of one such myth, "There were elements of spontaneity, of
course, in the Washington legend, too, but it was, for the most part, a self-conscious product.''
The apparent spontaneity of the outlaw heroes assured their popularity. By contrast, the official values had to rely on a rational allegiance that often wavered. These heroes' different
statuses accounted for a structure fundamental to American literature, and assumed by Classic
Hollywood: a split between the moral center and the interest center of a story. Thus, while the
typical Western contained warnings against violence as a solution, taking the law into one's own
hands, and moral isolationism, it simultaneously glamorized the outlaw hero's intense self possession
and willingness to use force to settle what the law could not. In other circumstances,
Ishmael's evenhanded philosophy paled beside Ahab's moral vehemence, consciously
recognizable as destructive.
D. H. Lawrence called this split the profound "duplicity" at the heart of nineteenth century
American fiction, charging that the classic novels evinced "a tight mental allegiance to a morality which all [the author's] passion goes to destroy." Certainly, too, this "duplicity" involved
the mythology's pattern of obscuring the necessity for choosing between contrasting values.
Richard Chase has put the matter less pejoratively in an account that applies equally to the
American cinema:
The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of
experience. When it attempts to resolve contradictions, it does so in oblique,
morally equivocal ways. As a general rule it does so either in melodramatic
actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed with both one may find the
stirring instabilities of "American humor."
Or, in other words, when faced with a difficult choice, American stories resolved it either
simplistically (by refusing to acknowledge that a choice is necessary), sentimentally (by blurring
the differences between the two sides), or by laughing the whole thing off.
