Dear Friends,
I need to talk about a film I saw recently, and I apologize that I cannot do it without spoilers.
Released in 2017, Hostiles is an American Western directed by Scott Cooper and starring Christian Bale and Rosemund Pike. It was a rather under-the-radar release, earning a modest $35 Million.
Critics basically shrugged. One called it a “by-the-numbers storyline with a rather obvious message about how it’s harder to be despicable to people after you get to know them.” Another was underwhelmed: “Scott Cooper directs Hostiles with an eye for 'greatness' but the actual material simply isn’t deep enough to justify the solemn presentation. It’s not entertaining, it’s not illuminating, it’s not even complicated. It’s mostly just a bummer.”
It is certainly true that the narrative is rather straightforward. U.S. Army Cavalry Captain Joseph Blocker (Bale) is ordered to escort a cancer-stricken Cheyenne War Chief, Yellow Hawk, along with four of his family members, to Montana for his final resting place. The problem is that Blocker hates the Cheyenne and hates Yellow Hawk. Threatened that he would lose his pension if he refused, Blocker reluctantly agrees to the assignment.
It is a simple “road trip,” then, and a great deal of things you’d expect in a standard-fare Western happens along the way. Quick summary: They rescue Rosalee Quaid (Pike), whose husband and children have all been gruesomely slaughtered by a band of Comanches. They get attacked by these Comanches, and in the middle of the night someone in their crew (Yellow Hawk and his son, it is implied) manages to exact vengeance against them in the middle of the night. Reaching an Army Fort, they pick up a court-martialed soldier, Charles Wills, for transport—arrested for war crimes against Indians, of course. Rosalee and Yellow Hawk’s family members are later abducted by fur traders, and Blocker and Yellow Hawk track them down, kill the traders, and rescue the women. Their prisoner, Wills, then manages to escape, takes the life of one of their men, and then his own life—so burdened and weighed down by what you’d diagnose as PTSD. They finally arrive in Montana, only to be accosted by threatening land owners; a gunfight ensues, and only Blocker, Rosalee, and Little Bear (Yellow Hawk’s grandson) are left standing.
The critics are right: it looks pretty “by the numbers.”
Honestly, I expected to hate this film. And I did hate it for a while because at first glance it seemed like one of morally relativistic films where there simply aren’t any heroes. As I thought deeper about it my hatred dissipated and I came to believe that, far from “not being deep enough for its solemn presentation,” Hostiles is actually a profound cultural commentary suited exactly for our times.
I first expected the usual “Variation on the Theme of Dances With Wolves.” You know the theme, ripped off and used in plenty of other films, from Ferngully to Avatar: the White Man is evil, the Native is pure and innocent. I expected this right up until…the opening scene, where Comanche butchers massacre Rosalee Quaid’s family.
So, not Dances With Wolves.
Then I began to expect the typical nihilistic and relativistic turn: everybody is rotten to the core and guilty, and who’s to say whether there are “good guys” and “bad guys”? Just paint the Plains Wars as one big atrocity and—The End.
Not quite. Everyone in this story is dealing with mountains of guilt for various reasons, and to experience guilt is to have a transcendent sense of right and wrong, truth and lies, wrath and mercy. There is a palpable longing for a better world (remember, the whole story is framed as a journey to Montana—which, as a Montanan, I take to be an excellent literary stand-in for heaven). But satisfaction of that longing seems utterly impossible because there is always another grievance to redress, another score to settle. Even when they get to “heaven,” it is populated by racist, hateful brutes that need shooting. How can the cycle of hatred, malice, and violence ever end? That is the question.
Yellow Hawk and his Cheyenne are guilty of terrible atrocities. The Comanche are guilty of terrible atrocities. Captain Blocker is haunted by his own terrible atrocities—positively awash in his guilt, hatred, malice, and self-loathing. Sergeant Wills tells him something like, “You know in plenty of other circumstances you would be the one in chains.” Wills later kills himself from the guilt of his own atrocities. With the possible exception of Rosalee, there aren’t any innocents here and it isn’t clear how this hellish reality can be overcome. Who will litigate the wrongs? Who will dispense justice? Who has hands clean enough?
Isn’t this a parable for our age? The number one hot-button cultural issue right now is race relations, historic injustices, and a cycle of oppression and violence. The great cause of our day is unearthing this or that historic wrong and the varieties of privilege and oppression thereby allegedly baked in to all subsequent human institutions and interactions. From the New York Times’s “1619 Project” (i.e., America was built on racism from the start) to the Critical Race Theory flowing out of the Ivory Tower, the reparations for slavery movement, to the on-the-street popularity of Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility, the agenda is clear: we must engage in a mass “archeological dig” into not only the past, so as to sort out the oppressors and victims, the “good guys” and “bad guys,” but also into our very souls, so as to root out all of the latent racism of our “whiteness.” If you’re so inclined, there are grievances to redress and scores to settle as far as the eye can see. Grievance all the way down. If it is injustice you seek, you will never find the end of it.
None of this is to deny real injustices and grievances that need redressing. Oh, far from it. What I do question is whether historical or spiritual or psychological archaeology can yield anything fruitful. I’ve seen it on an interpersonal level: people, even counselors, who think the way forward from conflict is to insist on digging ever backward into the past, to scour the “record of wrongs” that the Apostle Paul tells us true love does not keep (1 Cor. 13), to demand an exact accounting of every infraction in order to balance out the ledger sheet. When literally everyone has a balance sheet marked in infinite red, this is a fool’s errand. And what does it yield even if the ledger could be balanced? A relationship that is forever entangled and bound up in literal works righteousness, strict justice, with not an inch of space for concepts like mercy, grace, and forgiveness. Call it “Cancel Culture.”
This is no way to live, and there is only one thing in the all of the annals of history that offers real hope to escape the sickening morass of our guilt and hatred and malice and score-settling: the cross of Jesus Christ. The canceling of our debts, and the freedom it offers from sin and guilt. Not only freedom from our slavery to sin, but freedom to extend each other grace and mercy and forgiveness. “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Eph. 4:32).
Rosalee Quaid, the only openly devout character, stands on a platform with Little Bear, a white woman and native boy, about to board a train heading for Chicago. She’s leaving it all behind—her buried family, her trauma, her bitterness. She thanks Captain Blocker for all he has done, and says goodbye. With her eyes and all the body language she can muster, she pleads with him to leave it all behind, too. But he is too captive to the life he has led, seemingly stuck in his guilt and his PTSD, feeling completely unworthy of such a woman. He turns and walks away back to his old life, down the platform as the train slowly lurches forward.
And then, at the last moment, he reaches out for the handrail of the caboose as it drifts by and steps on board.
We can do an archaeological dig, wallow in our past, try to sort out the good guys and the bad guys and balance the ledger, figure out who did what when and how and where, and we will have no end of guilt, bitterness, grievance, and hate.
Or we can get on the train.
Miscellany
The House of Representatives impeached the President for the second time. I mentioned last week that I wouldn’t object if they pursued that option; but I do have to complain. Leave it to Nancy Pelosi to mess it up. Her article of impeachment is for “incitement to insurrection.” The problem? Both of those words have very specific meanings and are subject to great debate. Why not stick with the indisputable facts? The President publicly pressured, in front of all the world, his Vice President to violate his oath of office to hand him an election he did not win. If that isn’t a violation of the oath of office and, as such, an impeachable offense, then nothing is.
Last week I talked about what I called “Whattaboutism.” Brett McCracken says it better than I. Please read and absorb his admonitions.
Want to read something surreal? Matt Lewis wrote a piece on August 14, 2020 entitled, “An Nightmare Election Night Scenario That I Bet You Haven’t Thought Of.” Impressively, his nightmare scenario happened exactly as he foresaw.
Do your spirits need lifting? Of course they do! Take the 5 minutes and 39 seconds to watch my former classmate and pastor, John Currie, interview John Piper about the Providence of God. You won’t regret it.
Did you enjoy The Queen’s Gambit? You might enjoy watching the real reigning World Champion give his analysis of the final game between Borgov and Harmon!
I’ll let Tommy Emmanuel take us out this week, with a rousing and mesmerizing rendition of “Amazing Grace,” live from South Korea. Enjoy!