Hell Or High Water Isn't A Western, It's A Fantasy
In a retrograde frontier, the only way forward is to look back
image by @needledesign via twitter
Tristan Young @talltristan
We look at the Western as a window into America’s history, in all of its messy and defiant glory. I’m not here to debate the validity or value of that assessment; it’s easy enough to acknowledge both. A nation birthed in part from frontierism, individualism, and violence- both racist and otherwise- creates a tapestry of narratives that we can extrapolate through Westerns as indicative of the early days of the American West. This spirit has persisted all the way to the present with modern Westerns such as No Country For Old Men and Sicario, both of which are inexorable documents on what America has become in a literal sense. One must also understand the appeal of a Western not through the lens of history, but as fantasy. Like the cynical artifice of an idea like Westworld, these stories derive less from true historical markers and more through a romanticised fiction of how we thought we lived, and how we wish we could today. Hell Or High Water examines where the fantasy of the Western intersects with the demoralizing reality of, well, reality. Its characters have plans, hopes and fears, world building citizens have versions of their place in America; all of it to one extent or another is a facile delusion. They hide in these palliative fantasies as long as they can, but none of them can escape the reality of the American Dream.
Hell Or High Water tells its story in the rural fringes of West Texas. When Toby Howard’s (Chris Pine) mother dies, the bank that had mortgaged her home and land are on the cusp of foreclosure. The only thing of value left in the family name is soon to be lost to an institutional spectre. To add insult to injury, Toby learns the land is rich in oil, a potential form of economic relief for his family that had long since lost such hopes. Like many in his situation, Toby has grown up in and knows only poverty. If he could somehow keep the land in his family, his children may know a more secure future, something that seems perpetually out of reach for his generation. With little in the way of legal or financial recourse, Toby recruits his ex con, manic older brother Tanner (Ben Foster) to help him in a dangerous line of bank robberies to raise the cash to pay off the mortgage. The genius of their ostensibly crude plan lies in its specifics. They will steal only from branches of Texas Midland Bank- the bank that is about to seize their mother’s land- to pay back Texas Midland Bank, laundering the cash through a casino to mask the money as gambling wins. Stealing from the people who are going to steal their land, and using that money to stave off ruin of their machinations. As a lawyer who helps them set up the deal puts it, “If that ain’t Texan I don’t know what is”.
The ideal of doing something in particularly Texan way- roguish, morally righteous if legally onerous- shares connotations with Western narratives and characterization. The film wants you to view the Howard brothers’ goal in the context of such stories. Yet it slowly and carefully erodes the semblances of the Western fantasy that they wish to occupy in favour of the creeping sense of more accurate contexts as it pertains to the American frontier, or what’s become of it. It does this through literal, symbolic, and most importantly historical means. First and most obvious is the literal dynamic of the film. Our anti-heroes are about to lose their family land and will stop at nothing to save it. Beyond that is the symbolic background of the devastating consequences of the financial crisis of 2008/2009, of which this story exists in the wake of. As the nation and the world limped through some idea of recovery, the rural parts of America, of which West Texas is largely emblematic of, were left behind. Stimulus packages, financial relief; most of it never trickled down to the people of these lands. The idea of American exceptionalism by way of its staunch individualism meets its logical and tragic conclusion as its citizens are crushed under the collective weight of despair that comes from the institutional safety nets abandoning them. Going it alone has been so broadly romanticised in American culture and its attendant cinema, but the people here are truly on their own, when they need help the most. The manner in which the only institution to have not gone dormant exists to inflict draconian financial pain on people through no wrong doing of their own, and with little recourse at their disposal to mitigate this, counters the idealism of putting the self over the community.
These injustices, portrayed in a modern setting, are enacted upon a largely white population. What is happening to them is egregious; it’s thematic scars written on the land and in the faces of those that occupy it, but for many of them the historical context and its cruel ironies are lost on them. Hell Or High Water doesn’t let them get away with such cognitive dissonance. It frames what’s happening to caucasians now in the light of exactly what they did to the indigenous population during the frontier days. The Comanche tribe were lords of the plains that would be West Texas and New Mexico, until white settlers brutally took it from them. They stole this land and now it is being stolen from them. It was as institutionally legitimate then as it is now.
This awkward disconnect and difficult reckoning is articulated through the relationship of Sheriff Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and his deputy Alberto (Gil Brimingham). The tension of their relationship, Marcus being white and Alberto being part Comanche and part Mexican, is hidden under the affable respect they have for each other, but it’s there. Marcus will pile on with a litany of racist jokes, ‘made in jest’; Alberto will occasionally respond in kind, or brush it off, leaving more and more of coarse chip on his shoulder. Alberto, in his always subtly restrained way finally draws a line, not at one more of Marcus bilious jokes, but at his mourning and eulogizing the loss of livelihood his American brethren must endure at the hands of heartless banks. Alberto starkly reminds him that what is happening to his people is just a modern version of what they did to Alberto’s hundreds of years ago in the name of progress.
“150 years ago all this was my ancestors land. Everything you could see. Everything you saw yesterday. Till the grandparents of these folks took it. And now it’s being taken from them. Accept it ain’t no army doing it”.
Marcus shares in the blame of the generational and cultural indignity of having one’s home stripped from them. If the Texas Midland Bank is the vile antagonist of this age, what does that make Marcus’ ancestors in the days of the Wild West? You don’t get it both ways. You don’t get to pretend any longer.
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That cocoon of make believe permeates nearly every aspect of Toby and Tanner’s story, although the pointedly fatalistic Tanner is more immune to its intoxicants. They strike at banks in sleepy western towns; so economically depressed and anaemic in infrastructure they could easily stand in for the dusty main streets of high noon shootouts from Spaghetti Westerns. The sparsely populated drags and mostly vacant banks they hit create a lonesome atmosphere, indicative of living not within society but among its fringes. It’s just like the out posts that sporadically dotted the untamed deserts and vistas of a burgeoning America. Everything happens within these spacious margins. Crimes occur hundreds of miles apart, with the police response just as far away. With nearly every individual armed, they are less inclined to adhere to federal notions of law enforcement, but will take their manifest destiny in their own hands, further fetishizing that American brand of rugged individualism. Toby and Tanner aren’t marauding criminals, but more akin to characters like Robin Hood enacting their moral superiority and autonomy against a faceless evil; stealing from the rich to give to the poor. With no one bedsides them and their antiquated brand of justice, they are the champions of their retrograde frontier.
Furthermore, the film’s mixture of economic depression and impulsive banditry articulates a particularly un-modern way of depicting the world, dove tailing precisely with our characters’ dreams of being arbiters of ‘Texan justice’. In a day-to-day basis, anything could happen to them. Bank robberies, high-speed chases, and shootouts with law enforcement or who knows whom else. Life is dynamic and disruptive, in the short term. However on a macro scale, nothing in anyone’s life ever really changes. Always poor, always devoid of opportunities, a land growing ever more derelict and lost to time’s cruelties. This is a direct antithesis of how we holistically look at our place in the world from a modern perspective. Generally we look at day-to-day life as one of stability and routine, but our future in the long term is envisioned through dynamic economic and educational mobility. Our lives will change drastically but over a comfortably surmountable curve of time, while our routines remain secure. The characters here are robbed of such prospects. It’s these prohibitive circumstances that make conditions so tailored to slide into the Western fantasy. Cowboys and Indians.
Hell Or High Water succeeds in part because it ensures this fantasy falls apart in disastrous and calamitous terms in its climax. As the deadline to pay off the lean on their mother’s house puts more pressure than anticipated on their plan, the Howards resort to hitting a bank in a much busier town, one that may be bigger than their grossly ad hoc tactics can handle. You can see the trepidation in Toby’s eyes as they approach their target. The fear. “It’s busy”, he mutters. This is not a sleepy rural main street; it’s a town. They have stumbled into modernity and they are not equipped to deal with it. There are too many people for them to effectively and safely crowd control in the bank, and people die for it. They are no longer anti heroes striking back at an unjust system, they are murderers. One of them pays the price for such hubris. One of them may still.
The bloodshed at that Texas Midland Bank demonstrates the film’s commentary on the state of gun rights activism and addiction to facile narratives. It pairs this with the historical notions of the brave sharp shooter protagonist of so may films in the Wild West, and how its legacy has created a toxic web of misguided advocacy on the issue. Any gun control supporter serious in making progress on the issue needs to acknowledge the absolute necessity of 2nd amendment as it was written, when it was written. In a time when they were expected to abide by federal and state laws envisioned to maintain order, Americans could not yet count on those same forces being there to actually protect them. America expanded geographically further than in it’s national infrastructure could extend to keep up. This was at no place more apparent then the west. People could not count on the police to be there to protect them, so they needed a gun to do it themselves. Ideas like this were part of the bedrock for how classic Westerns were defined.
Flash forward a couple centuries and that rationale is less convincing. Arguments in favour of liberal applications of the 2nd amendment have been manipulated and exploited by the NRA for their financial gain as well as the industries they lobby for. Liberty has less and less to do with their argument. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun”, NRA ghoul Wayne LaPierre once famously extoled. As many were quick to note, that just sounds like someone who wants to sell two guns. Nevertheless it has become the corner stone of the rational behind open carry laws in states such as Texas. Hell Or High Water is rife with examples of individuals just aching to exercise their 2nd amendment rights any way they can. When Sheriff Marcus warns a local about bank robbers in the area, the individual brags about how quickly he would put them down himself. “God I love West Taxes”, Marcus retorts, with a not so subtle hint of sarcasm. Later on a loud mouth troublemaker, reeking with white privilege pulls a gun on a nonchalant Tanner with the assumption that that will put him firmly in control of the coming confrontation. It doesn’t. The film rightly mocks the delusional notion that the minute you have a gun you think you’re pretty much John McClane. You’re not. Stop thinking this, it is dangerous.
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Later, a character that wants to play hero pulls a gun on the Howards during their final heist and accomplishes nothing more than getting himself killed, swiftly and unglamorously. Shortly after a make shift militia chases down the escaped robbers, on the hunt to become a veritable firing squad. All it takes is Tanner and one automatic weapon to scare them all off, nearly a dozen of them. The acute swiftness in which they transition from a cadre of badass highwaymen to running in cowardly defeat is clarifying. Tanner is man who has known violence for most his life. The others have seen it on TV. Simply owning a gun does not make you equipped to mitigate such violence. Thinking it does is a foolish dream, one this film is all too willing to end.
Sheriff Marcus is himself not inoculated from problematic and wishful thinking, albeit in much more personal and tragic terms. The idea of a world weary law man sacrificing his life to the cause is such a cinematic cliché that even the inversion of the trope has become one. Hell Or High Water however injects an ironic, even paradoxical sense of suffering in its take on the genre staple. Marcus, being days away from a forced retirement is clearly dreading the looming lack of purpose that will soon define his remaining years. He and Alberto go back on forth on ideas of what he can do with his impending free time. Marcus glibly hopes, “maybe one of these bank robbers is gonna want a gun fight and I can dodge my retirement in a blaze of glory”. We know where this is going, and where it won’t go. Marcus takes a peculiar and somewhat passive approach to hunting Toby and Tanner across West Texas, to Alberto’s chagrin. He opts to plant himself on a patio adjacent to a Texas Midland Bank and just wait there all day. Maybe that’ll be the next one to get hit? “I know what your doing”, says Alberto, “you’re trying to make this last as long as you can because the longer it lasts the farther you are from that front porch”. He’s right.
Marcus wasn’t able to avoid his looming purgatory in a blaze of glory. He was doomed to survive the climatic confrontation with Tanner. Instead it was Alberto, who had a long life and career ahead of him, who was fatally struck down by Tanner’s rifle. None of this is particularly innovative on it’s own. However, the magnitude of such a universal injustice is not lost on Marcus. He was terrified of a life with no purpose, but in the end he got one; He may have killed Tanner but Toby got away. Marcus would use whatever life he had left towards bringing Toby to justice and avenge he lost partner. Marcus needed a purpose to avoid a retirement induced decline into obsolescence. He found one, but only through Alberto, the one that a traditional Western would dictate survives, loosing his life. The guilt of being on one side of that trade off informs the final choices he makes in the film. He wanted a traditional ending, but instead had to write his own, with all the messy ambiguities that come with it.
The only one that really saw the fallacy of believing in these cinematic ideals was Tanner. He understood his reality more fully than any character, and that it was likely to come an end. The film punishes those who bought in to the fantasy of the Wild West, but it punished those who saw past it too. That indiscriminate narrative cruelty is indicative of Hell Or High Water’s view of the world, and what’s become of it. We have no quarter in reality or a dream; institutions won’t save us and the cost of manoeuvring outside of them is too high. Where does that leave everybody, beyond a world of uncertainty in our present and our future? On the other hand, what’s more Western than that?