THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS

Okay that’s a fair assessment. Reality is that young women captured by Indians on the frontier were in real peril. I’ve seen the Searchers and some of the scenes were rough. But the first story - Ballad of Buster Scruggs - remind me again how that was a slice of reality in the Wild West?

The girl shooting her brains out in a moment of panic was sad and I accept that life and art can cross paths. But the marriage proposal by a wagon train cowboy and the modest and attractive girl’s acceptance and their dream of forging a future together, that was a hope in everyone’s heart that things would turn out well for them. Even yours I bet. I’m not going to discuss the other mini movies I watched where I could again say that the Coen brothers warped the outcome in order to dash our hopes that something good could come about from the scene they set up.

I was thinking of No Country For Old Men. That was a brutal film. Violence and death in much of that film. But that was tolerable to me because that was what I expected. A killing machine, a terminator without cyber skills going after the fools who tried to outwit him. I could understand that, but the Ballad of Buster Scruggs with one queer ending after another? No thanks.

Maybe it’s because our culture has become one, long unmasking of evil that I’ve become sick of so-called “realistic” endings. Yeah, the baby who was just born is left to die by so-called doctors and nurses because its mother decided the day before its birth that she doesn’t want to be troubled by it, or it gets torn apart limb from limb with the exception of important body parts that can be sold on the open market and the whole world yawns.

There is plenty of grit and despair in this world. Maybe the Coens should watch Sullivan’s Travels again.

Take a look at my post #56. Out of curiosity, last night I read the original short story "The Girl Who Got Rattled" written in 1901 by Stewart Edward White. The story of the the attack by Indians in the movie is very true to the original story, right down to the dialog and the prairie dog town. Hollywood normally radically changes stories, but their is great fidelity to the original written including yelling "Dog Hole!," explaining what will happen to her if she is captured by Indians, and tapping her on the forehead. It's a good short story.

This is Tragedy in the original Greek sense, a play in which the main heroes come up against the forces of fate and are eventually defeated by those forces, despite all their heroic strengths.

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