Arthur Penn: New Edition

Rustling Up: Robin Wood on The Missouri Breaks

With the Same Serenity Little Big Man Aline and Robin Wood, Positif, no. 126 (April 1971), 1–8. Translated from the French translation of the lost original into English by Myriam Lacroix and Gabrielle Grant. About a third of the way into Little Big Man, Jack Crabb marries a Swedish woman, Olga, and the young newlyweds get their picture taken in front of the store they have just purchased together. Inside the camera’s viewfinder we see an image of the happy couple, inverted and frozen. Jack is proudly pointing up at the store’s sign above the awning, and a voice (that of the photographer, one supposes ) asks them to “Preserve the moment.” The voice is in fact that of Arthur Penn, and the phrase is the title of a book of photos by his brother, Irving.9 But there is more here than the mere homage, the private reference, intended by Penn: this incident helps define, if only by contrast, the essence of his outlook on life. A few seconds after this shot, Jack Crabb, seemingly distraught, trips while crossing over the doorstep while Olga hangs on to his neck. Within a few minutes he declares bankruptcy, and the couple’s goods are put up for auction. Penn then cuts abruptly to an Indian attack against a wild stagecoach, after which Jack is thrown into the water and Olga is kidnapped. Penn’s last four films since The Chase unfold in a fully cohesive movement: a movement toward progressive disintegration and loss. This element was already fully anticipated in The Left Handed Gun, and even the denouement of Mickey One, which appears to be more optimistic, is none other than the acceptance of perpetual terror as a condition of existence. The obvious subject of Little Big Man is the progressive extermination of Indians by whites, but on the other hand, the progressive deterioration or elimination of white With the Same Serenity 155 characters, Jack’s parental substitutes, also appears throughout the film. The quasi symmetry of this construction grants to each one of the white characters (with the exception of Custer) two matching sequences. In the first sequence, Mrs. Pendrake is the wife of a pastor; in the second, she has become a prostitute. In his first appearance , Wild Bill Hickok tries to maintain a precarious reputation as a sharpshooter; in his other scene, he is killed by a young boy. The grotesquely comical crook Merriweather presents a striking summary of this general movement of loss: when he appears for the first time, he is already missing an arm and an ear, and shortly after he loses an eye; when he reappears later in the film, he has lost a leg and his scalp. The Swedish wife, almost childish in her vulnerability, degenerates, in the Cheyenne camp, into a virago who beats her husband. Custer’s psychopathy escalates, and finally he loses his mind on the battlefield. yet the principle of loss is never more clear than in the development of Jack Crabb himself. His white wife is kidnapped by Indians, and his Indian wife is massacred by whites; the characters who successively fill the role of father figures die one after another or he rejects them. At the end (and at the beginning) of the film, Jack is an incredibly old man living in an old folks’ home—he leads an existence that, it would seem, is completely isolated. For the characters in Penn’s films, life is characterized either by a desperate fight for control over situations that escape them or, as a last resort, by helplessly giving in during a course of events that they implicitly know they cannot control. Of all the protagonists in the seven films Penn has directed to date, only Annie in The Miracle Worker successfully dominates the chaos that she faces. It is characteristic that this be by the means of a half-blind and instinctual fight rather than by the methods of an enlightened rationalism. Even Pat Garrett is deprived (by what is basically the suicide of Billy) of any feeling of satisfactory authority, and Calder in The Chase (of all of Penn’s characters, perhaps the most mature and the most responsible) submits in the end to the chaos that surrounds him and recognizes his defeat. Irving Penn, artist of the fixed image, tries to capture and immortalize the 156 robin wood essence of life by...