Review: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
A Meditation on Capitalism, Violence, and Its Exchange Rate
Just recently I stumbled across a Coen Brothers production that effortlessly muscles into my Top 10. It comes in the form of a Western anthology that covers the gamut of the human experience. It is a story about what defines America: Capitalism, violence, and their exchange rate.
Warning: has spoilers.
1. The eponymous Ballad of Buster Scruggs recounts the tale of a lone wanderer who goes about singing and slinging guns across the Wasteland Wild West until he meets his match on the day he gets dealt the dead man’s hand. In dynamic systems defined by capitalism and violence, you can’t remain “top dog” forever.
2. Near Algodones is about a criminal who is hanged for a crime he did not commit, and is the origin of the “First Time?” meme. This illustrates the metaphorical inevitability of jail, a theme I have dwelt on a lot over the past few years.
3. Meal Ticket is the the slowest paced vignette, but also by far the most depressive. An impresario and his artist, an orator with no arms or legs, journey from town to town, recounting classics such as Ozymandias (“two vast and trunkless legs of stone”) and the fratricidal story of Cain and Abel. This isn’t canon, but I got strong vibes that the impresario and the artist are father and son. Interest in the performance falls, as the crowds are instead drawn to a chicken that can apparently do math. The impresario runs down the last of their savings to buy the chicken, and is then strongly implied to have disposed of his artist. Capitalism has no use for depreciated assets, which are brusquely shunted aside as soon as soon as they stop providing a “meal ticket”; taken sufficiently far, in starker and more resource-constrained times, that extends to human capital as well. Adding to the irony of the situation, the chicken can only provide the impresario with one meal - the impresario didn’t buy the special box that gave the chicken its mathematical “prowess”. It is, in fact, just a chicken. He exchanged his orator for a scam. Winner, winner - chicken dinner!
4. All Gold Canyon is the only (mostly) wholesome story. A grizzled prospector is searching for gold in a mountain valley. After a hard day’s work, he spots an owl’s nest. Climbing up the tree, he initially takes all four eggs, but then puts three of them back under her reproachful eyes (better than standard practice, which I believe was to take half). This karmic boon allows him to survive a less scrupulous individual who wanted to shortcut his way to the gold lode through hyper-violence, and make off with the hard-earned fruit of his labor.
5. Alice is a young, smart, but very self-effacing woman - for such was the expectation of women in that time - who is accompanying her brother Gilbert and their dog President Pierce in a settler wagon headed west. Gilbert, an inept businessman, dies from cholera en route. She is then pressured to have President Pierce put down because his barking is annoying the other passengers, to which she sadly but passively accedes. Facing financial uncertainty, she then agrees to a marriage proposal from Billy Knapp, one of the two wagon train leaders.
It then turns out that President Pierce had survived, and Alice rushes to collect him a few hills over. However, she is ambushed by an Indian raid. Mr. Arthur, the other wagon train leader, gives her a pistol with two bullets and tells her to shoot herself if he is killed. He survives - just about. But The Gal Who Got Rattled does not. The boy and his dog live - but not the girl.
This is a sad commentary on the lack of women’s autonomy under the low exchange rates between capitalism and violence that defined most of history. Alice was enslaved to the whims of her feckless brother, couldn’t save Pierce because another man said so, and at last quit life on a man’s authority - she could at least have trying using one of the two bullets to kill the last Indian.
6. Five passengers on a stagecoach ride through the darkening and ever more ethereal West discuss the meaning of life in Mortal Remains. One is a trapper, who represents the naturalistic view on death, simple, Malthusian-minded, in tune with the seasons. One is a bon vivant French hedon, who displays an agnostic, non-judgmental curiosity towards all aspects of life, and is perhaps the least concerned about death; it is ultimately just another interesting experience, even if the last one. The upright Christian lady has unrealistic views about her long absent husband’s fidelity, at least in the opinion of the Frenchman, and represents the theological view on death - outwardly graceful, inwardly tormented. They may also represent the three ages of the West - the primordial trapper with his Indian wife, the happy go lucky adventurer, the late civilizing feminine.
They are accompanied by two bounty hunters. They sing of the unfortunate lad. Company policy is that the stagecoach doesn’t stop for any reason. They are transporting a corpse on the stagecoach roof. (Is it Buster Scruggs?). Either way, it suddenly dawns on the passengers that this is it, the nether realm, purgatory, gray and washed out, the end of the lie that terminates in a hotel and a lighted staircase that takes them wherever it is that souls go to after death. The Frenchman is first to step out. The trapper follows cautiously. The lady, last, and reluctantly.
I do think that this is what America is fundamentally about. In its self-image, it is a green and verdant Commonwealth, defined by the Constitution and peopled by Albion’s seed. But it is in the desert of the West that it was stripped bare of its frills and excesses, where its true character was revealed, and where I believe its true ethnogenesis occurred and has subsequently served as backdrop for the definitional products of American culture such as Blood Meridian and Fallout. The primordial state of raw capitalism and hyper-violence in which it began, and perhaps may yet return to before this age of the world ends.