Bush-Era Frontier Epics Express Timely Doubts About American Imperialism

image: Deanna Newcomb

Above: The Alamo (2004)

Related Content

• DJANGO UNCHANGED
  January 30, 2013
• Good Enough to Read: Our Five Can't Miss Book Events
  March 6, 2013
• Needed: Restaurant Sign Spell Check
  November 7, 2011
• Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios at MOMA
  June 12, 2013
• High Noon
  July 18, 2012

More About

• John Wayne
• The Alamo
• The Last Samurai
• Westerns
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

One of the stickiest points of Alamo studies lies in the exact circumstances of the death of the man-myth Crockett, cracker-barrel philosopher and U.S. congressman. Wayne took florid heroic license, of course, but Hancock reportedly depicts the king of the wild frontier surrendering to Mexican forces and then being executed. "I don't like that word 'surrender,' " intoned Kathleen Milam Carter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the group that oversees the Alamo site. In other words, don't mess with Texas lore.

The devotee needs to be able to say of her hero, "He died a good death"—the appraisal of Custer delivered in The Last Samurai by the warrior lord Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe). The samurai later demonstrates his respect for the hapless colonel when he leads a suicidal attack against a lineup of new howitzers. Is it in the nature of brave, honorable warriors to die horribly outnumbered, as at Little Bighorn or the Alamo? (And can such martyrdoms double as advertisements for the Defense Department's Econo-Save approach to troop deployment?) Algren tries to burst the bubble: "[Custer] was a murderer who fell in love with his own legend," he says. The western always prints the legend of an era long past, but lately they're as messy, murky, and disillusioned as the times we're living in.