The Philosophy of Ang Lee

All's Fair in Love and War?: Machiavelli and Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil

265 all’s faIr In loVe and War? Machiavelli and Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil James Edwin Mahon Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil (1999) is a film about war and love. It is a common belief, captured in the proverb “All’s fair in love and war,”1 that when it comes to war and love, there are no rules.2 The ends—winning the war, and winning the heart of one’s beloved—are supposed to justify any means whatsoever. In particular, they are supposed to justify deception.3 In this chapter I will address the question of whether Ride with the Devil endorses the view that when it comes to war and love, deception is justified. In Ride with the Devil, the war in question is the U.S. Civil War—in particular,theborderwarbetweentheantislaveryKansasjayhawkersandproslavery Missouri bushwhackers. The love in question is that between a young widow and an immigrant German boy fighting for the Southern bushwhackers . I shall first provide some historical context to this war, explain why this war interests Lee, and why he is sympathetic to the Southerners. I shall then argue that his true sympathy is for the outsiders on the Southern side and show that it is these individuals who form the moral core of the film. Because these same people engage in deception, I shall consider what the film has to sayaboutdeception.IshallarguethatunlikethegreatChinesemilitarystrategist Sunzi, the film does not endorse the view that all deception is justified in war and love. Instead, it can be shown to agree with Machiavelli that even in war, there are limits on when deception can be practiced. It can also be shown to suggest that in love, it is honesty that is ultimately required. According to Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil, all is not fair in love and war. General Lee, or Yanqui Go Home The War between the States, otherwise known as the Civil War,4 is thought of as a war fought in the South and the East of the United States.However, 266 James Edwin Mahon the prospect of the creation of new slave states in the Midwest contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War, and the war was also fought in the Midwest . Before the war, a dispute over whether Kansas should be a slave state or a free state led to a series of violent clashes between Southern (largely Missourian) pro-slavery Border Ruffians, and Northern antislavery Free Soilers or Free Staters settlers, in what is referred to as Bleeding Kansas, Bloody Kansas, or the Border War. Although the violence had abated by 1859 and Kansas entered the Union as a free state in January 1861, with the commencement of the Civil War in 1861, the border war erupted again. Missouri did not secede from the Union, but the governor refused Lincoln’s call to send volunteers to invade the South. The governor and the state legislature were deposed, and they fled in order to avoid arrest. The Missouri state guard actually fought against the federalized militia. As another commentator has said, “Only a massive build-up of Union troops and a lack of support from the Confederate government in Richmond kept Missouri in the Union. In an effort to preserve their lives, property, and sacred honor, many rural Missourians either joined the Confederate army or fought their own guerilla war against the invading forces.”5 Those who fought their own guerilla war against the invading forces of pro-Union irregular jayhawkers, as well as the Union federals, were known as the bushwhackers.6 Ang Lee’s film about this border war between the jayhawkers and the bushwhackers came about by chance. In 1987, a woman named Amy Carey read Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On (1987),7 a novel about three people—an immigrant, a former slave, and a young widow—caught up in the cross-border fighting.8 Years later, Carey was working for a production company associated with Lee and gave him the novel. Lee read it “in 1994 while attending a screening in Deauvile, France, of his recently completed Eat Drink Man Woman [1994].”9 According to James Schamus, Lee’s longtime collaborator and the author of the screenplay, “he got so engrossed in it that it interrupted his reading of the script for Sense and Sensibility [1994]. He knew right away that he had to make this movie.”10 As Woodrell himself tells the story, Lee wanted to get out...