The fiercely free individual is nothing against the vast forces of modernity. Nostalgia is weak against what is here and what is coming.
The film has a beauty. I agree with Stephen Klugewicz that we “rightly revel in its broad and beautiful cinematic brushstrokes: its scene painting of the joys of the bucolic way of life, its depiction of the formative power of the past, its idealization of the thoroughly non-modern man. ‘Maybe we are here to remake everything, reshape everything, create our own new idea of perfection and leave God’s idea to the dim shades of history,’ Allen declares during one courtroom appearance. ‘And maybe I, having fought against that new idea, rejected that idea, found that idea abhorrent, maybe I was wrong. But I do not think so.'” It does, as Klugewicz suggests, warm the heart.
The film brought to my mind the Southern Agrarians and their reactionary manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. It was a book brought to my attention by John Baden when I met him in his home near Gallatin Gateway, on one of my forays through Montana in search of a better conversation. The book is a collection of essays by something of a literary tribe, who understood their plight in terms of the loss of their Southern identity amid the displacements of “northern industrialism.” The Lost Cause was a conversation about being somebody in some place. Dixie was a place, unlike the trampling out the vintage, which was an abstraction. They sided with Thetis and against her son Achilles, that his shield should have borne the images of “White flower-garlanded heifers” and “athletes at their games” rather than nameless, faceless players acting their assigned roles. We should be thoughtful about what we fight for. Theirs was an ambiguous movement jousting ineffectually at the thousand tentacles of modernity. That book, too, has an air of nostalgia about it.
In Savannah, Ward Allen resists game laws and developments that drain the wild out of his river, leaving individuals amid places dying into nameless processes. “This is real,” he says to his wife, when he finally takes her to one of his sacred places, though by then it is too late. Many will sympathize with him. We see the soulless machinery of international financial conspiracy subject us all to corrupt law, we know something of the flattening education the Capitol favors, where young people “engage” in literacy tasks organized around reading passages nearly void of meaning, practicing the bland skills that might provide a paycheck in the institutional hallways and cubicles that await them out there. We sense that in the world they are making, there really is no place for us, and if we are not young, we know that the simulacrum offers no satisfying alternative.
Ward Allen does not know what to do, and his action at the end of the story has more to do with giving up than with finding a way. It is a film filled with beauty, evoking what is being lost. I would have liked him to say more about what he understood about God’s idea. Lesser topics may serve no good.
