Joel and Ethan Coen’s film version of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit (2010), has many of the hallmarks of a traditional Hollywood Western: a demand for retribution, a manhunt, and law enforcement officers who typically exceed the boundaries of their authority for the purpose of implementing their own notion of ‘justice’. While invoking such familiar tropes, however, the film also uses the theme of law to portray the American West in a state of transition. The fourteen-year old heroine, Mattie Ross, seeks justice for the murder of her father, but the way in which she sets about her goal alters the way in which retribution once typified the enforcement of frontier justice. Throughout the film Mattie uses law (including the promise or threat of legal proceedings) as a weapon and a means of placing herself on equal footing with members of the adult world: she becomes the employer of a US Marshall (and hence acquires the right to direct his actions), negotiates sales contracts, suggests the possibility of plea bargains to outlaws, and regularly sends instructions to her (unseen) legal advisor, J. Noble Daggett. The narrative of the film is set in the late nineteenth century. Yet in its depiction of the settling of differences, the story is also profoundly of our time. The Coen brothers portray the West’s transition to a modern society as a process by which legally enforceable contracts and bargains are used to structure personal relations. Epitomized by the figure of Mattie Ross as the ‘bookkeeper’ and recorder of transactions, True Grit depicts a process by which law seeps into everyday language, and the structures of social organization are renegotiated by those ready to invoke the power of the courtroom.
See Full PDF See Full PDFIn this paper, the authors seek to use the insights gained by viewing and thinking critically about a range of Hollywood films to better illuminate the disciplinary blindspots of law. Both law and film are viewed as social institutions, engaged in telling stories about social life. Hollywood films are often critical of law and legal institutions. Law is dismissive of its representation within popular culture. However, the authors argue that law disregards cinematic cynicism about itself at its peril and that there is much to learn by taking cinematic portrayals of law very seriously---not as representations of the truth of law, but as analogies for how law itself operates in constructing truth. Indeed, the authors conclude by arguing that law requires a better conception of itself as a culturally productive institution. Law, like film, is not simply engaged in the finding of truth, but also more fundamentally in the making of meaning
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This paper argues that the Coen Brothers’ 2010 version of True Grit makes innovations to the original novel by Charles Por- tis that evoke the Greek myth of the descent to the underworld, or catabasis.
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Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice
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Western American Literature
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Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
This article considers the significance of dirt to three Western texts: Lonesome Land, Mudbound, and Brokeback Mountain. The overall argument is that the more complicated and ambiguous dirt is permitted to be, the more imaginative and critical potential it has for the iconography of the contemporary Western. Taking B.M. Bower’s 1912 Western Romance as a model, it is argued that the dirt aesthetic is crucial to how Westerns construct the myth of the American character. This is further complicated by intersections between representations of the White rural poor, women (as for both Lonesome Land and Mudbound, there are connotations of sexual impurity in the dirty White female body), and representations of queerness. In the two versions of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s film, we see the ambiguity of dirt: it can be read as an essential part of the American land, or as polluting waste matter. The critical framework draws on feminist history and criticism via.
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Virginia Law Review
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In this paper, I argue that the nineteenth century West is used in the films True Grit (1969) and Unforgiven (1992) as a kind of “safe space” where societal notions of the antithetical nature of age and masculinity in twentieth century America can be challenged. While scholars such as Richard Slotkin, Brian Baker, Will Wright and Lee Clark Mitchell have long noted and analyzed the varied negotiations of masculinity within the Western, there has been little discussion of the role or influence of age on these portrayals. This paper follows in the steps of much emerging men and masculinities research that posits age as a key definer of masculinity (Spector-Mersel 70), arguing that its inclusion in the analysis of masculinity in Westerns such as True Grit and Unforgiven is necessary for a fuller understanding of the complexity aging adds to performances of hegemonic masculinity. This analysis is achieved primarily through close readings of the films True Grit and Unforgiven as works of historical fiction that project current concerns about masculinity into the past. Guided by scholarship on age in men and masculinity studies and on masculinity in Westerns, this reading foregrounds the way the aging heroes meet and largely overcome challenges to their masculinity, primarily through traditional demonstrations of strength, violence, and competence aided by the iconicity of each film's star. It is in the nature of these recuperations that a line between the untroubled masculinity of True Grit and the fractured masculinity of Unforgiven can be drawn. Both films reject the antithetical positioning of aging and masculinity in Western society (and many Westerns) and suggest through the bodies of aging gunslingers that even old men can be masculine. While this may seem an uplifting reclamation of masculine identity for older men, its reliance on the demonstration of physical strength, power, and domination tie it to growing requirements that men “age successfully” - which may be just as damaging as denying older men “masculinity” altogether.
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2009, 42 Suffolk University Law Review, 829
