GHMC: Alamo

Grim's Hall Movie Club: The Alamo

Since we've all watched it, I won't post a review at length. There are a couple of things I'd like to talk about, though. Any of you with author's accounts are welcome to start a post of your own if different aspects of the movie interest you; or just add to the comments, as you prefer.

I. Honor v. Authority

The movie has three leading roles: Col. Travis, Davy Crockett, and Jim Bowie. It's hard to manage that coherently, but each of the three walked so largely in life that they cannot be downplayed in the story.

The writers decided to steal adapt a strategy from the poem that lies at the very root of our civilization. Theodore Roosevelt's history of the Alamo begins with a comparison of the Alamo to Thermopylae, but this retelling reaches back father still. It takes the form from the Iliad, and points to the clash between honor and authority. A hero is a tremendous asset to an army; wars cannot be won without them, and men follow them gladly. Yet the hero's own sense of right and wrong, honor and virture, lead them to argue for what they think is right rather than what they are told. Because men follow them gladly, the very act of fighting for what they think is right splits armies and disrupts the chain of command.

The Iliad remains the most important poem in our culture, even as the Bible remains -- in spite of all that has been written -- the most important book. Even today, we find this to be one of the hardest lessons of leadership -- and one of the hardest things to learn when we are called not to lead but to follow and take commands, for a common goal.

(If you have not read the Iliad, or if you were introduced to a bad, boring or incomprehensible version of it, let me offer a suggestion: Do not read it. Rather, listen to it. It was composed to be heard, and it should be. Get a copy of an audiobook of the Fitzgerald translation from a library or a bookstore, which is by far the best in the English language. I cannot recommend this strongly enough -- if you come by Grim's Hall regularly, you will never regret the time you spend with it.)

Just as in the Iliad, the tension between the three characters is between a man who is willing to set aside mens' honor for victory; a hero whose devotion to honor makes him clash with that first man; and a wiser, older hero who has come to understand both authority and honor, and make them work together. In the Iliad, these heroes are Agamemnon, Achillles, and Odysseus. In the Alamo, they are Col. Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett.

Travis asserts his authority through military discipline, and right of command. He is willing to speak insultingly to Jim Bowie to shut down challenges to his orders ('You were drunk at the last officer's call, and I do not wish to discuss my plans until the next'). He is willing to publicly slur the credibility of friendly Mexican caballeros who bring him word, because he's afraid the word they bring might panic the men and cause desertions. He is gallant to those who are doing what he wants -- as when he shows honor to the arriving Tenneseans -- but cares nothing for the honor of men who disagree with him. Rather than resolving the clash with Bowie, it makes it worse and worse, until Bowie is ready to take his men and depart.

Bowie and his men (like Achilles' Myrmidons) are volunteers, and can leave when they wish. Travis needs them to hold until aid can arrive. He also needs the help of another body of volunteers who arrive under the command of another hero, Davy Crockett.

Crockett appears less of a hero to Travis than his reputation would suggest. Travis is not happy to find his Crockett and his men brawling and drinking, and he refers to Crockett's usual manner of speech as a 'bumpkin act.' Yet when he hears Crockett's speech about the Republic, he is taken aback. So it was said of Odysseus:

One might have taken him for a mere churl or simpleton; but when he raised his voice, and the words came driving from his deep chest like winter snow before the wind, then there was none to touch him.
Crockett understands the balance between honor and authority: both Travis and Bowie trust him, and he is able to mediate between the two. Yet he has this flaw, as Odysseus had it: he uses that ability to understand both worlds, and gain trust in both, to manipulate. He manipulates Travis by appealing to him calmly and with respectful words, as he does after Travis has already dismissed Bowie following the destruction of the great cannon. He manipulates Bowie by playing on his sense of honor and shame, as he does when he introduces him to the kid, tells the kid to ask him 'about that Sandbar fight,' and then says that Bowie is leaving. Of course, Bowie cannot shame himself by admitting he was planning to leave, and so ends up staying.

Yet at last Crockett's manipulations can't hold the army together. What keeps them there to fight and die is this: the moment when Travis decides to let them go, and speaks glowingly of what they have accomplished so far. When Travis takes up the language of honor, and calls them brave and noble soldiers, neither Bowie nor any other will leave him.

That is the lesson, then: for Travis, to honor his soldiers as heroes, as well as to command them as men; for Bowie, to set aside his pride and follow. So he does, and dies for it, and thereby wins the honor he so craved:
The fort that was a mission
Be an everlasting shrine!
Once they fought to give us freedom,
That is all we need to know
Of the thirteen days of glory
At the siege of Alamo.

II. Santa Anna

Perhaps it is also because they drew so heavily on the Iliad, but the treatment of Santa Anna is remarkable. We are used to seeing him "on a horse that was black as the night," a cruel and vicious killer of brave men. One of the unusual qualities of the Iliad is that it shows sympathy to everyone in it: though it is a poem composed in Greek, by Greeks who saw themselves as descendants of the Greek heroes of the poem, it never treats the Trojans as anything less than their own heroes.

That is almost unheard of in heroic literature, where one may fight greater things -- demons, dragons -- or lesser ones -- witness Conan slaughter endless numbers of nameless, purposeless men! We are so used to seeing enemies demonized that we expect it. Even political campaigns now almost always descend to it.

That makes it all the more astonishing to see what great lengths the film goes to in order to portray Santa Anna as a noble and heroic man. Indeed, he is painted as being better than he really was: no real comment is made on his decision to offer no quarter, and everyone is portrayed as dying in combat rather than in later executions.

Yet it is not just that the film elides over his harsher parts. It actively shows him as good and noble. He offers a chance for the men guarding the Alamo to retreat. After they refuse and he has attacked the mission, he discovers the presence of noncombatants and allows them safe passage. There is no suggestion in the film that he attempted to take the families of the men inside as hostages, or did anything but honor his word that they would be safe. Indeed, there is never a suggestion that the men inside the Alamo ever suspect that he would.

The two high notes of this theme come after the battles. After the first battle, some of the volunteers watch from the walls of the Alamo as families of the slain Mexican soldiers look over the dead in search of their kin. The grief of these family members is shown just as strongly as the grief of the Texans later; and in fact, the Mexican women watching the Texan lady leave the Alamo cross themselves in sympathy with her.

Meanwhile, the volunteers muse about the heroism of the men they have killed. "I was proud of them. Even as I was killing them, I was proud of them," one says. 'It speaks well of a man that so many aren't afraid to die, being sure they are right. It speaks well.' Of course it is military discipline that sent them forward in reality; but in the film, it was love and trust in their commander.

At the last scene in the movie, the lady of Texas is allowed to go free from the Alamo, and given a burro for her child to ride. Santa Anna arranges his army so that she will pass them where they are in full dress uniform. As she passes, he summons the men to present arms in salute. He does not meet her eye, but removes his hat in a display of honor for her.

How odd to see a foe allowed to be so noble! And yet, it makes Jim Bowie, and Crockett and Travis seem all the bolder and better. They lost; but they lost to a noble hero, inheritor of the best traditions of Europe. We know that Houston, inheritor of the best traditions of America, will soon meet him and best him. We finish feeling not simple satisfaction at the end of a villian, but awe and pride that such a man, and such an army, could be overcome by a ragged pack of heroes and volunteers.

The music swells, and invokes the protection of God on the souls who guarded the mission. We are sure that somehow, that is right. Yet the movie does not put Santa Anna on the side of the devils. It is content to view him as another flawed hero, as we all are flawed heroes.

No comments: