Lonely Are The Brave

When we first saw "Lonely are the Brave" in 1962, my fellow Bard College students and I found it possible to appreciate the film on two levels. It was similar to Sam Peckinpah's "Ride the High Country" and other films meditating on cowboy as beloved anachronism. This cowboy is a symbol confronting all the new forces--the automobile, barbed-wire, etc.--impinging on the last bastion of freedom, the old west.

In the opening scene of "Lonely are the Brave," we see Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) stretched out in front of a campfire with his horse by his side. His restful contemplation of the awesome beauty of the New Mexico high country is then interrupted by the raucous sound of a squadron of military jets flying in formation overhead.

On another level the film seemed to evoke some of the beat generation literature that many of us had read as high school students. In novels and poems hearkening back to Thoreau's "Walden Pond," the beats rejected civilization and embraced the simpler, freer and more rustic world of the ranch hand, hobo or forest ranger. These were the sorts of characters who cropped up in Kerouac's novels and found particular expression in the life and work of Gary Snyder, the Buddhist poet who saw the Pacific Northwest forests as a sanctuary from the corporate greed and mindlessness of the Eisenhower era.

Now--nearly 40 years later--that I have learned the full story behind the making of "Lonely are the Brave," the beat generation associations not only become more meaningful, I also understand the importance of the film to the radical movement since it brought together two disparate strands of the American left: the screenplay was by Dalton Trumbo, one of the greatest blacklisted writers in Hollywood, while the screenplay itself was based on one of Edward Abbey's anarchist/deep ecology masterpieces, "The Brave Cowboy."

The driving force behind the movie came from Kirk Douglas, who was one of the first to challenge the blacklist by insisting that Dalton Trumbo write the screenplay for "Spartacus" only 3 years earlier in 1958. Douglas, who often starred in the same kind of mindless beefcake spectacles as Burt Lancaster, was not at all like the characters he played in films (nor was the bisexual and liberal Lancaster!). He was the son of a Russian Jewish ragman from the Lower East Side and a product like so many in the entertainment industry of the vast cultural and social forces embodied in the New Deal radicalization. While never a Communist himself, he believed that the blacklist was evil and put his reputation on the line by standing up for Trumbo. (Lancaster was not what he appeared as well. In real life, he was bisexual and something of a radical.)

After a couple of years tending sheep, Jack Burns has come to town to break his old friend Paul out of jail. Paul is a scholar about to be transferred to a penitentiary to begin serving a two year for running a modest underground railroad for undocumented workers from Mexico.

Since the only way he can free Paul is by becoming a prisoner himself, he goes to town to find a saloon where booze and trouble often go together. He is not disappointed. As soon as he takes a seat in one such establishment to begin enjoying a bottle of whiskey with a beer chaser, a one-armed man hurls an empty bottle at his head. In keeping with a innate sense of fair play, Burns uses one arm to fight the man in a lusty barroom brawl that honors the best traditions of the Western film.

After he is arrested, he finds himself in the holding pen with Paul where he lays out his escape plan. With the two hacksaws he has smuggled inside his boots, the two should be able to break out before morning arrives. Paul demurs. He has a wife and a young son. The sentence for jail break in New Mexico is 5 years. He would prefer to serve out his term and return to a normal life. While a jail break might deliver freedom in the short run, it also would sentence him and his family to a life on the run.

Although Jack can not persuade him to break out, he himself has no qualms. With the assistance of Paul and other prisoners, he cuts through the bars to the street below. He then returns to Paul's house where he has left his horse. From there, he heads toward the mountains, beyond which Mexico and freedom await.

>From this point, the main action of the film takes place, pitting the lone resourceful cowboy against a posse made up of local lawmen and a helicopter deployed by the same airforce base whose jets disturbed his peace in the opening scene of the movie. In charge of the whole operation is Sheriff Monty Johnson (Walter Matthau) who seems to harbor a secret desire to see the prisoner escape. This is understandable since Johnson, and most of the audience watching the film, probably felt trapped by American civilization in the early 1960s. This world was described by Gary Snyder in the following terms in the poem "Front Lines":

A bulldozer grinding and slobbering
Sideslipping and belching
The skinned-up bodies of still-live bushes
In the pay of a man
From town.

Behind is a forest that goes to the Arctic
And a desert that still belongs to the Piute
And here we must draw
Our line

Although we identify with Jack Burns's bid for freedom, there is a foreboding sense that it will not be successful. As he climbs up the mountain with his horse in tow, we feel that he will be captured at any moment. This climb might have reminded many college students of the Myth of Sisyphus that Albert Camus had interpreted as a symbol of the existential fate of modern man. In this Greek myth the hero pushes a boulder up a hill for all eternity. Just as he is about to reach the summit and freed of his burden, the boulder comes tumbling down on him. For Camus, this represents the failure of 20th century man to achieve deliverance from the oppressive social and economic forces that control him. Even ideologies like Marxism that promised freedom only served to erect new barriers.

Although the film resonates with such overarching philosophical concerns, you have to turn to Abbey's novel to find their full expression, especially the scene in which Jack explains his decision to break jail to Paul's wife Jerry.

"You say you’re going to hide for a few days—what does that mean? What then? Where will you go?"

Burns ate heartily; a touch of egg adorned his beard. "I can go north, west or south. Winters comin so I guess I’ll go south: Chihuahua or maybe Sonora, dependin on how things look."

"What will you do down there?"

"I dunno. Just live, I guess." He swabbed his plate with a piece of bread. "I like Mexico—it’s a good clean honest sorta country. I have friends there."

"But Jack—" Jerry hesitated. "You’ll be back, won’t you?"

"Sure. When I'm nothin but a face on the postoffice wall I’ll come a-sneakin back. You’ll see me comin down across the mesa out there some evening when things are peaceful."

"Don’t talk to me like that. You know you can’t go on like this—you’re in the Twentieth Century now."

"I don’t tune my life to the numbers on a calendar."

"That’s ridiculous, Jack. You’re a social animal, whether you like it or not. You’ve got to make some concessions—or they’ll hunt you down like a... like a... What do people hunt down nowadays?"

"Coyotes," Burns said. "With cyanide guns." He finished his coffee and wiped his mouth. "I better get a move on."

Another important distinction between the novel and the film is that both Paul and Jack are self-professed anarchists in the novel. Although Jack is not prone to discuss politics, it is clear that his political beliefs underpin his unquenchable desire for personal freedom. His friend Paul is much more the ideologue, who is in jail not for harboring undocumented workers but for refusing to register with the draft in 1948. Despite having served in the military during WWII, both Paul and Jack feel that a peacetime draft is the first step toward militarizing American society. They were right, of course.

Abbey's anarchistic defense of personal freedom and pristine wilderness made him a hero to the deep ecology movement, especially the wing that used sabotage against the bulldozers and other mechanized instruments of "development." His 1975 novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang" amounted to a manifesto of Earth First activism. To defend the American West against a Big Government/Big Business, a cabal of rugged individualists choose to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery creating roads, dams, bridges and other dubious symbols of civilization.

This movement continues to this day and makes up a substantial part of the anti-WTO protests that reverberate out of Seattle. On reflection, the anarchists appear to evoke certain themes found in Abbey's literature beyond a hatred for out-of-control development. Namely, they seem to be in love with the notion of the beautiful loser embodied in Jack Burns's Sisyphean bid for freedom. Anarchism, unlike Marxism, seems less interested in strategies for victory but more in dramatic gestures that evoke personal refusal to go along with the status quo, no matter the price. For anarchists, key historical events seem to be more about defeat than victory. While Marxists commemorate October 1917, the anarchists are fixated on the defeat of the Kronstadt rebellion or the Spanish Republic. (This is something of a mystery to me since I believe that socialism must be built on victories rather than defeat. In months to come I plan to explore some of these questions as they relate more directly to anarchist ideology.)

The other thing to keep in mind is that the deep ecology movement's pursuit of aboriginal purity has led it to sometimes embrace dubious notions bordering on xenophobia. While Abbey, who played a bit part as a cop in "Lonely are the Brave", seemed to have no objection to Paul being transformed from an anarchist draft resister into a comrade of undocumented workers, he would eventually take an entirely different attitude toward immigration issues. He wrote, "It would be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, culturally, generally impoverished people." This kind of anarchism seems to fit in neatly with the anti-immigration agenda of such mainstream outfits as the Sierra Club and the Worldwatch Institute.

Finally, it is worth considering how the logic of the lone rebel can be driven to the extreme when detached from underlying questions of class. After all, the plot of Sylvester Stallone's "First Blood" has many similarities with "Lonely are the Brave." After Rambo breaks out of jail, he manages not only to avoid capture by a posse, he shoots down a helicopter in a scene that is practically stolen from the original. With Alexander Cockburn's flirtation with the militias, these sorts of questions take on a genuine immediacy.