Once an upstanding husband and father, Cohle's tragedies-his daughter's death, his marriage's dissolution-drives him toward a cold fixation on work. It was hard to ignore the ring of McCarthy about Rust Cohle, the grizzled detective played by Matthew McConaughey in “True Detective”'s first season who speaks mostly in nihilistic aphorisms. You might be trying to save your child or get your family's horses back or deliver bounty and secure your future, but you're destined to be the meal of a blood cult, or discover there's nothing of your heritage left to cherish, or become the victim of a random, senseless personification of evil toting a captive bolt pistol. In its place is the sense that history is a long arc toward tragedy, a vast nothingness in which darkness is all that is real. The 20th century destroys the promise of a plenteous future. McCarthy imagines the West as a place where evil reigns, and good only occasionally breaks through the darkness once in a while-a peasant who cares for an injured cowboy, a cellar of stolen canned goods, the brief paradise opened up by newfound love. is “no country for old men.” In “ The Road,” a man and his young son, so disconnected from civilization that they no longer really have names, travel in search of safety-but the man is a consummate wanderer, aware that he's there to try to deliver a next generation to the future, if such a thing exists anymore. His “Border Trilogy” trails latter-day cowboys John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, young men discovering that the American dream has let them down. And of all living American storytellers, Cormac McCarthy has cornered the wanderer's tale everyone else works in his shadow. Even Jesus himself lives into the type, albeit by choice, living his adult life as a homeless man headed for his death, an itinerant preacher whose imprecations fall largely on unbelieving ears.įrom Melville's whale-haunted Ahab onward, the same trope pops up throughout American literature. The entire nation is eventually led into exile, and most of them never return. Other prophets like Ezekiel act as loner performance artists, never permitted to lead a normal life, taking on great discomfort and performing weird stunts to bring some message to those who remain hard of heart. Jonah tries to flee his distasteful mission-a charge to preach repentance to his enemies in Ninevah-by taking to the high seas, only to discover that you can't outrun God's plan when it involves a whale. The wanderer trope-a man without a home, with a seemingly futile mission he didn't choose-repeats through the Bible: Moses, for instance, after losing his temper and disobeying God, is left to lead the Hebrews in endless circles in the wilderness for forty years, in sight of the Promised Land, but he is never allowed to enter. Today his name is synonymous with fratricide. He goes on to build cities and raise sons. There's a sort of severe mercy in the punishment God metes out: when Cain protests that people will want to kill him whenever they meet him, God places on Cain a sign to protect him, swearing that those who mess with Cain mess with God. The father of all wanderers is Cain, who in the book of Genesis kills his brother Abel out of jealousy and then is condemned by God to a life as a fugitive away from his home, an echo of his parents' ejection from Eden. And if he exists at all, the God of today's West more often fits most people's idea of a vengeful, capricious Old Testament God than a benevolent bestower of gifts. Those stories were their stops on a redemption road, places to atone for one's sins.īut though today's craggier, crueler landscape finds its archetype in the Bible as well, the land is trod by men who are not strong and silent heroes, but wanderers: not characters in pursuit of redemption, but characters pursued by a presence, tortured and possessed souls sure only that the universe is out to get them and kept alive only by some dogged mission they didn't choose themselves. The cowboy rides into town, running from a secret or a shady past. Westerns have always been the backdrop for men with dark histories, of course. It’s a wasteland purgatory for the doomed and damned. Rarely is it a hopeful vista trod by the courageous. Today, with the weight of history behind us, we don’t cast it a sort of Promised Land the West we see on screen-not confined to the plains and the Rockies anymore-more often resembles a place of judgement than promise. But how we've imagined it has shifted over the years. American storytellers' fascination with the expanse west of the Mississippi has never really let up.
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