The Last American Cowboy

What is a critique of masculinity? Is it trying to get men in touch with their feelings? Is it simply a rebuke of violent solutionism? An exploration of power as a simple machine for leveraging positive outcomes, and the  historic/cultural distribution of the means of that power to men? Perhaps on one level. Or is a critique of masculinity a look at the way social constructions of manhood, maleness, and masculinity create a severely limited menu of options from which to process emotions, traumas, and joys? Perhaps it is both. What I do know is that a ‘Critique of Masculinity’ has become something of a filmic buzzword over the last, let's say half decade. If the article “Men are in Trouble and Hollywood Wants to Help” , written by Manohla Dargis for the New York Times in 2019, I am not alone in my estimation that trying to get men in touch their feelings has become a very prevalent artistic framework. 

Questions such as these, mean a great deal to me. I am a butch transgender dyke. I have not undergone hormone therapy or any surgeries and I got deeper into masculinity as I came into my own womanhood. To me the pop cultural lens around masculinity is gendered to a level that might never be separated out. It makes me dysphoric. In the article Dargis talks about what critic Raymond Duggan called ‘male weepies’, the kind of bloody and emotional action films that have been the mainstay of dad and uncle dvd collections for years. Something like Saving Private Ryan. I have always loved that hard edged masculine tenderness which exists in a war flick, a position that plants me, critically speaking, in maleness. We hav known that butchness is nonbinary, so not much new there. I thought Tom Hanks' casting in Saving was transcendent when I first saw it in honors American studies. I couldn’t quite explain why until now, because of the way Hanks has alway represented what can be seen as the best facets of American hetero normative masculinity, in additon to the great things Hanks brings to a role as an actor. He is comforting and sensitive while still being a firm figure. I think groups of women make me feel ousted more often than not. So something like a male weepie lets me see emotions, lets me feel a way into a story without feeling like a wolf in a hen house, as I live under two layers of predatory conditioning. First as a tranny and second as a dyke. Both identities paint me as a predator. 

The idea of the male weepie places this current wave of masculine critique firmly in heteronormativity. Which isn’t necessarily bad. Cishet dudes are, as much as some queers like to joke, people too. And have a right to process and berieve the way, to quote myself here, they are victim to patriarchal self-cannibalization. A phenomena I noted in instances when men I knew growing up would indicate moments of feminist double standard around things like hair length and piercings. What they were really pointing out were moments when they themselves had butted up against the limits of patriarchal framework, calcified as a cultural subject in the form of masculine norms. That is to say, however, I am interested in a conversation around masculinity that recognises the limit of a gender essentialist framework.   

Cowboy is, in essence, about two men chasing down the destinies of their fathers. Loren frames this, sometimes convoluted, story around the American mythic image of the cowboy. Loren does well handling the genre. To get more specific with the plot. The movie follows the misadventures and meanderings of Jerry ‘Jericho’ MckJunken, played by Hunter Slattery, as he follows the instructions of his deceased father and follows his dreams. Those dreams take him to Claremont, South Dakota (New Hampshire) in search of cattle to rustle and seeds to sow. After a comedic understanding with a dude that is honestly doing a pretty decent midwestern accent, leads our main (anti?) hero to turn to the life of an outlaw. From here we are introduced to the second cowboy force of our epic. The man in black. Com-eddy, Played by Edward Ferland. In search of a pistol to carry out his outlaw schemes, he happens upon Com-eddy telling jokes in a town square, getting pelted by tomatoes for their terribleness. Bonding over their shared cowboyness Com-eddy just gives him a handgun. Then he attempts to rob a train at the Claremont South Dakota (NH) Amtrak station. After having failed to rob a train, he retires to a sandpit, lights a fire, and has a tomato thrown at him. Out of the shadows steps Com-Eddy. Who shoots Jericho, the squib in this scene is dope. Thus ending our first chapter. 

Oh yeah. Cowboy is told out of chronological sequence as; prologue/ chapter 1/ chapter 2/ chapter 3. The slashes represent the scenes where Jericho is talking to the detective, the first chapter is Jericho describing his call to action. The dream he has where a cowboy talks to him. I’ve seen the movie twice now and I honestly can’t remember what the hat says. The story catches up with itself in chapter 3. 

Com- eddy, through some shadowy connection, comes to find that Jericho's dad is not dead, and he was the man who orphaned him (referring to the car crash in the prologue). By affixing his critique to the penultimate American symbol of masculinity, the cowboy, and its advertising avatar the Martlboro Man, Loren can be braud in his technique. The clearest running thread I saw was how, in giving himself over to his cowboy ideation, Jericho literally did not know what the fuck was going on. When he gets to the Restaurant in his first scene, he can’t tell that its a restaurant, too fooled by what he wants it to be, i.e. a ranch. He doesn’t know that they don’t transport treasury bonds by rail anymore. He has been actively placed in the past. A scene in the very real sweet fire BBQ reveals that Jericho never really had an I.D.

Loren makes what I find to be a mistake common amongst cis people when critiquing masculinity. They throw the baby out with the bath water. Masculinity is seen as a realm of danger. Much in the way stupid atheists see the church or religion as itself the inherent ill, rather than all the systemic, tangible, forces around these non tangible essences. Like what the fuck even is masculinity. I’m a trans woman and a butch dyke and I don’t really know! So how can we create such negative implications to something that is hardly even knowable. Masculinity is harmful in and of its rejection of femininity, of its womanness. And it's here that Loren might have failed to interrogate his subject matter to the degree he should have. 

While the structure is clever, the script is less elegant. What feel like large incidentals, or constraints of working conditions make it harder to tease out deeper meaning. Some of the dialogue can be stilted, or a little less eloquent. I am a sucker for the cowboy gunfight monologue. Its honestly one of my favorite things in fiction. Com-Edy strikes such an alluring facade as the man in black. His ‘man on the other end of a gun’ speech at the Climax could have been so incredible. But, ‘sell em cigarettes to make their dicks bigger’ felt lackluster. They had a fire, it looked great! 

The two cowboys eventually have their gun fight. Jericho inching out a victory. Both men having to contend with the cycle of violence that the generation before them had wrought onto their lives. Though not by exploring those feelings or even ‘doing as the cowboys did’ (what Jericho was referring to that is unclear as I thought having gunfights is what cowboys do and Jericho never seemed particularly interested in historic awareness). They feel out this familial trauma through the gunfight. And when Jericho walks away he completes the ultimate cycle in the annals of toxic masculinity: the oedipal, he kills his dad. Annihilating himself in essence. Completing a small tragedy. In the end he couldn’t escape the cycle. Watching the film is like watching him walk unknowing into the destruction of himself. Though we aren’t left with the sense that Jericho has learned anything which drove him to kill his own father, the very reason he set out on the chain of events we have just watched, a fact Jericho himself notes just before he kills his dad. 

There is a playful Nihilism to Loren’s work, so I don’t think the world of Cowboy is one where people learn lessons in the end. Its one where delusional men are ineffective to stop the dangerous events they set in motion. Pointing back to the article I mentioned at the top, Loren manages to leave women wholly out of his critique of masculinity, save for the mother in the prologue, who is abandoned by the killed father, to pursue his dream of becoming the Marlboro man. But she is dead before our story even really kicks off, a dead mother as motivation. No woman really has a character to play. And when talking about masculinity, or specifically the gendered understanding of that dynamic, as a thing men do to women, or patriarchal reaction to the degradation of womanness, then why leave women out? Why give no woman anything really to do? I suppose because the pain men cause each other, the pain fathers cause sons, is just as integral to the communal healing of men. 

  I would also add no character in the film seems like they have much to do. The characters don’t seem much like characters save for maybe Jericho and Com-eddy. Outside of those two every other person is a cardboard cutout on a stick designed to populate the world and to move it along the path toward the climax. fleeting machinery pieces. The expositional nodes on Loren’s map. I’m not going to hold that against the film, as a slaving regard for realism in a story isn’t a particularly interesting way to look at art. When you realize that realism isn’t the be all, end all of artistic storytelling, you become open to a whole other world of possibilities. Perhaps what we’re being shown is that the masculine script makes people more into cardboard cut out versions of themselves rather than their actual self.   

The Last American Cowboy is a project borne from the deep love of its creator, and that certainly shows. As a first feature it shows tremendous promise and I hope Loren is given the opportunity to expand his reach. Given more resources to execute his vision, and given more time to mull over just where next that vision can take him.