The Thematic Paradigm

The dominant tradition of American cinema consistently found ways to overcome dichotomies.
Often, the movies' reconciliatory pattern concentrated on a single character magically embodying
diametrically opposite traits. A sensitive violinist was also a tough boxer (Golden Boy); a boxer
was a gentle man who cared for pigeons (On the Waterfront). A gangster became a coward
because he was brave (Angels with Dirty Faces); a soldier became brave because he was a coward
(Lives of a Bengal Lancer). A war hero was a former pacifist (Sergeant York); a pacifist was a
former war hero (Billy Jack). The ideal was a kind of inclusiveness that would permit all decisions
to be undertaken with the knowledge that the al ternative was equally available. The
attractiveness of Destry's refusal to use guns (Destry Rides Again) depended on the tacit
understanding that he could shoot with the best of them, Katharine Hepburn's and Claudette
Colbert's revolts against conventionality (Holiday, It Happened One Night) on their status as
aristocrats.

Such two-sided characters seemed particularly designed to appeal to a collective American
imagination steeped in myths of inclusiveness. Indeed, in creating such characters, classic
Hollywood had connected with what Erik Erikson has described as the fundamental American
psychological pattern: The functioning American, as the heir of a history of extreme contrasts and
abrupt changes, bases his final ego identity on some tentative combination of dynamic polarities
such as migratory and sedentary, individualistic and standardized, competitive and co-operative,
pious and free-thinking, responsible and cynical, etc.... To leave his choices open, the American,
on the whole, lives with two sets of''truths.''l

The movies traded on one opposition in particular, American culture's traditional dichotomy of
individual and community that had generated the most significant pair of competing myths: the
outlaw hero and the official hero.2 Embodied in the adventurer, explorer, gunfighter, wanderer,
and loner, the outlaw hero stood for that part of the American imagination valuing
self-determination and freedom from entanglements. By contrast, the official hero, normally
portrayed as a teacher, lawyer, politician, farmer, or family man, represented the American belief
in collective action, and the objective legal process that superseded private notions of right and
wrong. While the outlaw hero found incarnations in the mythic figures of Davy Crockett, Jesse
James, Huck Finn, and all of Leslie Fiedler's "Good Bad Boys" and Daniel Boorstin's "ringtailed
roarers," the official hero developed around legends associated with Washington, Jefferson,
Lincoln, Lee, and other "Good Good Boys."

An extraordinary amount of the traditional American mythology adopted by Classic Hollywood
derived from the variations worked by American ideology around this opposition of natural man
versus civilized man. To the extent that these variations constituted the main tendency of
American literature and legends, Hollywood, in relying on this mythology, committed itself to
becoming what Robert Bresson has called "the Cinema."3 A brief description of the competing
values associated with this outlaw hero-official hero opposition will begin to suggest its
pervasiveness in traditional American culture.

1. Aging: The attractiveness of the outlaw hero's childishness and propensity to whims,
tantrums, and emotional decisions derived from America's cult of childhood. Fiedler observed that
American literature celebrated "the notion that a mere falling short of adulthood is a guarantee
of insight and even innocence." From Huck to Holden Caulfield, children in American literature
were privileged, existing beyond society's confining rules. Often, they set the plot in motion (e.g.,
Intruder in the Dust, To Kill a Mockingbird ), acting for the adults encumbered by daily affairs.
As Fiedler also pointed out, this image of childhood "has impinged upon adult life itself, has
become a 'career' like everything else in America,"4 generating stories like On the Road or Easy
Rider in which adults try desperately to postpone responsibilities by clinging to adolescent
lifestyles.

While the outlaw heroes represented a flight from maturity, the official heroes embodied the
best attributes of adulthood: sound reasoning and judgment, wisdom and sympathy based on
experience. Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack constituted this opposing
tradition's basic texts, persuasive enough to appeal even to outsiders (The Great Gatsby). Despite
the legends surrounding Franklin and the other Founding Fathers, however, the scarcity of mature
heroes in American literature and mythology indicated American ideology's fundamental
preference for youth, a quality that came to be associated with the country itself. Indeed, American
stories often distorted the stock figure of the Wise Old Man, portraying him as mad (Ahab),
useless (Rip Van Winkle), or evil (the Godfather).

2. Society and Women: The outlaw hero's distrust of civilization, typically represented by
women and marriage, constituted a stock motif in American mythology. In his Studies in Classic
American Literature, D. H. Lawrence detected the recurring pattern of flight, observing that the
Founding Fathers had come to America "largely to get away.... Away from what? In the long run,
away from themselves. Away from everything."5 Sometimes, these heroes undertook this flight
alone (Thoreau, Catcher in the Rye); more often, they joined ranks with other men: Huck with
Jim, Ishmael with Queequeg, Jake Barnes with Bill Gorton. Women were avoided as representing
the very entanglements this tradition sought to escape: society, the "settled life," confining
responsibilities. The outlaw hero sought only uncompromising relationships, involving either a
"bad" woman (whose morals deprived her of all rights to entangling domesticity) or other males
(who themselves remained independent). Even the "bad" woman posed a threat, since marriage
often uncovered the clinging "good" girl underneath. Typically, therefore, American stories
avoided this problem by killing off the "bad" woman before the manage could transpire (Destry
Rides Again, The Big Heat, The Far Country). Subsequently, within the all-male group, women
became taboo, except as the objects of lust.

The exceptional extent of American outlaw legends suggests an ideological anxiety about
civilized life. Often, that anxiety took shape as a romanticizing of the dispossessed, as in the Beat
Generation's cult of the bum, or the characters of Huck and "Thoreau," who worked to remain
idle, unemployed, and unattached. A passage from Jerzy Kosinski's Steps demonstrated the
extreme modern version of this romanticizing:

I envied those [the poor and the criminals] who lived here and seemed
so free, having nothing to regret and nothing to look forward to. In
the world of birth certificates, medical examinations, punch cards, and
computers, in the world of telephone books, passports, bank accounts,
insurance plans, wills, credit cards, pensions, mortgages and loans, they
lived unattached.6

In contrast to the outlaw heroes, the official heroes were preeminently worldly, comfortable in
society, and willing to undertake even those public duties demanding personal sacrifice. Political
figures, particularly Washington and Lincoln, provided the principal examples of this tradition, but
images of family also persisted in popular literature from Little Women to Life with Father and
Cheaper by the Dozen. The most crucial figure in this tradition, however, was Horatio Alger,
whose heroes' ambition provided the complement to Huck's disinterest. Alger's characters
subscribed fully to the codes of civilization, devoting themselves to proper dress, manners, and
behavior, and the attainment of the very things despised by the opposing tradition: the settled life
and respectability.7

3. Politics and the Law: Writing about "The Philosophical Approach of the Americans,"
Tocqueville noted "a general distaste for accepting any man's word as proof of anything." That
distaste took shape as a traditional distrust of politics as collective activity, and of ideology as that
activity's rationale. Such a disavowal of ideology was, of course, itself ideological, a tactic for
discouraging systematic political intervention in a nineteenth-century America whose political and
economic power remained in the hands of a privileged few. Tocqueville himself noted the results
of this mythology of individualism which "disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of
his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his
taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.

This hostility toward political solutions manifested itself further in an ambivalence about the law.
The outlaw mythology portrayed the law, the sum of society's standards, as a collective,
impersonal ideology imposed on the individual from without. Thus, the law represented the very
thing this mythology sought to avoid. In its place, this tradition offered a natural law discovered
intuitively by each man. As Tocqueville observed, Americans wanted "To escape from imposed
systems . . . to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things . . . in most
mental operations each American relies on individual effort and judgment" (p. 429). This sense of
the law's inadequacy to needs detectable only by the heart generated a rich tradition of legends
celebrating legal defiance in the name of some "natural" standard: Thoreau went to jail rather than
pay taxes, Huck helped Jim (legally a slave) to escape, Billy the Kid murdered the sheriff's posse
that had ambushed his boss, Hester Prynne resisted the community's sexual mores. This
mythology transformed all outlaws into Robin Hoods, who "correct" socially unjust laws (Jesse
James, Bonnie and Clyde, John Wesley Hardin). Further- more, by customarily portraying the law
as the tool of villains (who used it to revoke mining claims, foreclose on mortgages, and disallow
election results--all on legal technicalities), this mythology betrayed a profound pessimism about
the individual's access to the legal system.

If the outlaw hero's motto was "I don't know what the law says, but I do know what's right and
wrong," the official hero's was "We are a nation of laws, not of men," or "No man can place
himself above the law." To the outlaw hero's insistence on private standards of right and wrong,
the official hero offered the admonition, "You cannot take the law into your own hands." Often,
these official heroes were lawyers or politicians, at times (as with Washington and Lincoln), even
the executors of the legal system itself. The values accompanying such heroes modified the
assurance of Crockett's advice, "Be sure you're right, then go ahead."
In sum, the values associated with these two different sets of heroes contrasted markedly.
Clearly, too, each tradition had its good and bad points. If the extreme individualism of the outlaw
hero always verged on selfishness, the respectability of the official hero always threatened to
involve either blandness or repression. If the outlaw tradition promised adventure and freedom, it
also offered danger and loneliness. If the official tradition promised safety and comfort, it also
offered entanglements and boredom.

The evident contradiction between these heroes provoked Daniel Boorstin's observation that
"Never did a more incongruous pair than Davy Crockett and George Washington live together in
a national Valhalla." And yet, as Boorstin admits, "both Crockett and Washington were popular
heroes, and both emerged into legendary fame during the first half of the l9th century."9
The parallel existence of these two contradictory traditions evinced the general pattern of
American mythology: the denial of the necessity for choice. In fact, this mythology often
portrayed situations requiring decision as temporary aberrations from American life's normal
course. By discouraging commitment to any single set of values, this mythology fostered an
ideology of improvisation, individualism, and ad hoc solutions for problems depicted as crises.
American writers have repeatedly attempted to justify this mythology in terms of material sources.
Hence, Irving Howe's "explanation:"

It is when men no longer feel that they have adequate choices in their styles of life, when they
conclude that there are no longer possibilities of honorable maneuver and compromise, when they
decide that the time has come for "ultimate" social loyalties and political decisions-- it is then that
ideology begins to flourish. Ideology reflects a hardening of commitment, the freezing of opinion
into system.... The uniqueness of our history, the freshness of our land, the plenitude of our
resources--all these have made possible, and rendered plausible, a style of political improvisation
and intellectual free-wheeling.

Despite such an account's pretext of objectivity, its language betrays an acceptance of the
mythology it purports to describe: "honorable maneuver and compromise," "hardening,"
"freezing," "uniqueness," "freshness," and "plenitude" are all assumptive words from an ideology
that denies its own status. Furthermore, even granting the legitimacy of the historians'
authenticating causes, we are left with a persisting mythology increasingly discredited by historical
developments. (In fact, such invalidation began in the early nineteenth century, and perhaps even
before.) The American mythology's refusal to choose between its two heroes went beyond the
normal reconciliatory function attributed to myth by Levi-Strauss. For the American tradition not
only overcame binary oppositions; it systematically mythologized the certainty of being able to do
so. Part of this process involved blurring the lines between the two sets of heroes. First, legends
often brought the solemn official heroes back down to earth, providing the sober Washington with
the cherry tree, the prudent Franklin with illegitimate children, and even the upright Jefferson with
a slave mistress. On the other side, stories modified the outlaw hero's most potentially damaging
quality, his tendency to selfish isolationism, by demonstrating that, however reluctantly, he would
act for causes beyond himself. Thus, Huck grudgingly helped Jim escape, and Davy Crockett left
the woods for three terms in Congress before dying in the Alamo for Texas independence. In this
blurring process, Lincoln, a composite of opposing traits, emerged as the great American figure.
His status as president made him an ex-officio official hero. But his Western origins, melancholy
solitude, and unaided decision-making all qualified him as a member of the other side. Finally, his
ambivalent attitude toward the law played the most crucial role in his complex legend. As the
chief executive, he inevitably stood for the principle that "we are a nation of laws and not men"; as
the Great Emancipator, on the other hand, he provided the prime example of taking the law into
one's own hands in the name of some higher standard. Classic Hollywood's gallery of composite
heroes (boxing musicians, rebellious aristocrats, pacifist soldiers) clearly derived from this
mythology's rejection of final choices, a tendency whose traces Erikson detected in American
psychology:

The process of American identity forrnation seems to support an individual's ego identity as
long as he can preserve a certain element of deliberate tentativeness of autonomous choice. The
individual must be able to convince himself that the next step is up to him and that no matter
where he is staying or going he always had the choice of leaving or turning in the opposite
direction if he chooses to do so. In this country the migrant does not want to be told to move on,
nor the sedentary man to stay where he is; for the life style (and the family history) of each
contains the opposite element as a potential alternative which he wishes to consider his most
private and individual decision. l l

The reconciliatory pattern found its most typical incarnation, however in one particular narrative:
the story of the private man attempting to keep from being drawn into action on any but his own
terms. In this story, the reluctant hero's ultimate willingness to help the community satisfied the
official values. But by portraying this aid as demanding only a temporary involvement, the story
preserved the values of individualism as well.

Like the contrasting heroes' epitomization of basic American dichotomies, the reluctant hero
story provided a locus for displacement. Its most famous version, for example, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, offered a typically individualistic solution to the nation's unresolved racial and
sectional anxieties, thereby helping to forestall more systematic governmental measures. In
adopting this story, Classic Hollywood retained its censoring power, using it, for example, in
Casablanca to conceal the realistic threats to American self-determination posed by World War II.

Because the reluctant hero story was clearly the basis of the Western, American literature's
repeated use of it prompted Leslie Fiedler to call the classic American novels "disguised
westerns.''l2 In the movies, too, this story appeared in every genre: in Westerns, of course (with
Shane its most schematic articulation), but also in gangster movies (Angels with Dirty Faces, Key
Largo), musicals (Swing Time), detective stories (The Thin Man), war films (Air Force),
screwball comedy (The Philadelphia Story), "problem pictures" (On the Waterfront), and even
science fiction (the Han Solo character in Star Wars). Gone with the Wind, in fact, had two selfish
heroes who came around at the last moment, Scarlett (taking care of Melanie) and Rhett (running
the Union blockade), incompatible only because they were so much alike. The natural culmination
of this pattern, perfected by Hollywood in the 1930s and early 1940s, was Casablanca. Its version
of the outlaw hero-official hero struggle (Rick versus Laszlo) proved stunningly effective, its
resolution (their collaboration on the war effort) the prototypical Hollywood ending.

The reluctant hero story's tendency to minimize the official hero's 20 role (by making him
dependent on the outsider's intervention) suggested an imbalance basic to the American
mythology: Despite the existence of both heroes, the national ideology clearly preferred the
outlaw. This ideology strove to make that figure's origins seem spontaneous, concealing the
calculated, commercial efforts behind the mythologizing of typical examples like Billy the Kid and
Davy Crockett. Its willingness, on the other hand, to allow the official hero's traces to show
enables Daniel Boorstin to observe of one such myth, "There were elements of spontaneity, of
course, in the Washington legend, too, but it was, for the most part, a self-conscious product.''l3
The apparent spontaneity of the outlaw heroes assured their popularity. By contrast, the official
values had to rely on a rational allegiance that often wavered. These heroes' different statuses
accounted for a structure fundamental to American literature, and assumed by Classic Hollywood:
a split between the moral center and the interest center of a story. Thus, while the typical Western
contained warnings against violence as a solution, taking the law into one's own hands, and moral
isolationism, it simultaneously glamorized the outlaw hero's intense self- possession and
willingness to use force to settle what the law could not. In other circumstances, Ishmael's
evenhanded philosophy paled beside Ahab's moral vehemence, consciously recognizable as
destructive.

D. H. Lawrence called this split the profound "duplicity" at the heart of nineteenth-century
American fiction, charging that the classic novels evinced "a tight mental allegiance to a morality
which all [the author's] passion goes to destroy." Certainly, too, this "duplicity" involved the
mythology's pattern of obscuring the necessity for choosing between contrasting values. Richard
Chase has put the matter less pejoratively in an account that applies equally to the American
cinema:

The American novel tends to rest in contradictions and among extreme ranges of experience.
When it attempts to resolve contradictions, it does so in oblique, morally equivocal ways. As a
general rule it does so either in melodramatic actions or in pastoral idylls, although intermixed
with both one may find the stirring instabilities of "American humor."l4

Or, in other words, when faced with a difficult choice, Amencan stories resolved it either
simplistically (by refusing to acknowledge that a choice is necessary), sentimentally (by blunting
the differences between the two sides), or by laughing the whole thing off.

1. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 286.
2. Leading discussions of the individual-community polarity in American culture can be found in
The Contrapuntal Civilization: Essays Toward a New Understanding of the American Experience,
ed. Michael Kammen (New York: Crowell, 1971). The most prominent analyses of American
literature's use of this opposition remain Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American
Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966) and A. N. Kaul's The American Vision (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1963).
3. Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: Urizen Books,
1977), p. 12.
4. Leslie A. Fiedler, No! In Thunder (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), pp. 253, 275.
5. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic Amencan Literature (New York: Viking/Compass, 1961),
p. 3. See also Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel and Sam Bluefarb's The Escape
Motf in the American Novel: Mark Twain to Richard Wright (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1972).
6. Jerzy Kosinski, Steps (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 133.
7. See John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Sef-Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 101-123.
8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1969), pp. 430, 506. Irving Howe has confirmed
Tocqueville's point, observing that Americans "make the suspicion of ideology into something
approaching a national creed." Politics and the Novel (New York:Avon, 1970), p. 337.
9. DanielJ. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Exper~ence (New York: Random House,
1965), p. 337.
10. Politics and the Novel, p. 164.
11. Childhood and Society, p. 286.
12. Love and Death in the American Novel, p. 355.
13. The Americans: T~e National Experience, p. 337.
14. Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor/Doubleday, 1957), p. 1.