FILM / I See A Darkness / Steve Mitchell
Image © MGM
”I See a Darkness” is part of a series, titled Mirror Box, which combines memoir with film criticism by examining films important to the author at different times in his life.
Warren Oates doesn’t give a fuck. About you or the horse you rode in on. He doesn’t care what you think. You want to sit down and have a drink, maybe play a little cards, fine. Join him. You want to fight, he’ll meet you in the alley. Just don’t kid yourself. He doesn’t give a fuck.
In Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974), from a script by Charles Willeford, Oates plays Frank Mansfield, a man who has vowed never to speak again—shooting off his mouth got him in trouble once—until he wins the Cockfighter of the Year medal. In the first five minutes, he loses his car, trailer, and girlfriend in a bet to sleazy-suave Jack (Harry Dean Stanton).
This is the kind of film in which you lose your girlfriend in a bet. The girlfriend (Laurie Bird) protests at first. She wants to go with Frank, but soon realizes she has no options. In this world, she doesn’t.
Frank sells his farm and starts again, teaming up with Omar (Richard Schull) to buy, train, and fight birds on his way to the big match in Milledgeville, GA. He’s staked everything on the season now. His family doesn’t understand, his girlfriend back home doesn’t understand. No one understands but other cockfighters.
Throughout the film, Hellman rarely allows the camera to stray from Oates and Oates interacts with everyone without a word. He mugs, shrugs, frowns—almost everything happens in his eyes, and his body follows.
Warren Oates knows there’s only one thing he can do well. It may not matter to some folks. They may not think it’s important, and that’s alright by him. He ain’t asking for their say so. He’ll do what he needs to do.
Oates is Bennie in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, released the same year, a slouching piano player in a shithole Mexican bar who jumps at the chance to find Alfredo Garcia for two slimy American henchmen even before he discovers Garcia is his girlfriend Elita’s (Isela Vega) lover. Ten thousand dollars seems like a good deal to recover the head of a man he finds is already dead. So, he and Elita set off across the Mexican countryside; their mission to find Garcia’s grave, dig him up, and relieve him of his head.
It's a picnic, a vacation. The top is down on his beater, Elita plays guitar as he drives and there’s always an open bottle nearby. Elita and Bennie are happy in a fleeting way they know could turn ruinous at any moment. And it does.
Their relationship is steeped in ambivalence. Both are getting older. Elita sleeps around. So, probably, does Bennie. Do they stay because they love each other or because each believes they don’t deserve better? There’s a certain desperation in their exchanges, and a mutual agreement to look away from that desperation, which comes to a head when they have lunch by the side of the road and Elita asks why Bennie hasn’t offered to marry her.
Bennie is shocked, nearly brought to tears; his conflicting feelings play across his face, astonishing him. The emotions continue to bloom as he stammers. Asking her, she accepts. It’s a surprisingly tender and vulnerable scene in a film so weighted in oppressive maleness. It doesn’t last, of course. There’s a head to acquire.
In the worlds of movie masculinity, stillness and vulnerability are never ends in themselves; they’re simply the pause before explosion. In these worlds, a man must do something; like it or not, he only exists in his doing. One last job, one more week. This new mission and I’m done, he always tells his wife, girlfriend, or child, but there are no movies made about that presumably happy eventuality.
Throughout the second half of Alfredo Garcia, the head—wrapped in a burlap sack, resonant with flies—rolls around in the passenger seat of Bennie’s car, replacing Elita, murdered by thugs at the gravesite. It rots in the Mexican heat like a tumor removed from the body yet impossible to dispense with.
Warren Oates has a bottle. Of whiskey. Or tequila. He’ll share with you. Take a seat. Warren Oates doesn’t have any glasses.
In their work, Hellman, Willeford, and Peckinpah were responding directly to the mythic, theatrical masculinity of the westerns that came before them. They’re attempting to uncover and define a sense of maleness outside the one they grew up seeing: the silent stranger, the man of few words but ironclad resolve, the captain sacrificing himself for his crew.
They’re looking for something dirty, something to taint the myth; the search drives them into the unconscious, the murky male darkness rarely represented in film before them. (There were antecedents. Hitchcock turned much-loved Jimmy Stewart into a sweaty, obsessed stalker in Vertigo.)
Hellman and Peckinpah wanted to demythologize masculinity and present its multifold perversions, its violence, and its self-disgust. Yet, film can’t help but mythologize. It’s the nature of the medium. As one mythology is dismembered another is coming together from its aggregate parts, and mythology, like every institution, wants only to preserve itself; it adapts to its environment.
They created a male protagonist at war with the world by virtue of his masculinity; a masculinity manifesting itself in actions happening at the margins of society. Few actors play someone who knows he’s morally compromised with more depth and commitment than Warren Oates.
Your word is your bond. A man ain’t got his word is a gutless son of a bitch. Some days that’s all you have. Your word and a bottle. You gotta nurse both. At a rickety table in the corner of a no-name bar. Some days, drinkin’s the only thing makes sense.
Monte Hellman had just made Two Lane Blacktop when he discovered Charles Willeford’s script in Roger Corman’s office. He’d worked with Corman for years. Corman had sent him into the desert with Jack Nicholson and $150,000 dollars in 1966. Hellman had returned with two pictures Corman didn’t know what to do with: The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. Still, Hellman had a style and stayed on budget, so Corman greenlit Cockfighter.
The film has minimal voiceover, heavier at the beginning, supplied by Frank. I like to imagine Hellman envisioned the film without voiceover, turned it in to the studio nearly wordless, and the studio looked at him incredulously. Are you crazy? they asked. I like to imagine he always knew he’d have to add voiceover but constructed film as if he wouldn’t. It works well without it.
Cockfighter is filmed on backroads, in bars and barns, at service stations and motels, in a South that was already fading at the time. Alfredo Garcia was shot in the grubbiest parts of Mexico Peckinpah could find. These are landscapes of abandonment, towns and villages already left behind by the century. This suited Hellman, especially; he was the filmmaker of the unseen. His subjects were always the quiet people who might have been inhabiting the edges of grander movies.
On those edges, in the background of every John Wayne or Tom Cruise picture are rooms, houses, towns filled with people like us. We, the audience, want to identify with the heroes—and for brief moments we do—yet we know we are not them; we are those who occupy the edges of the frame. We are faceless and nameless in this universe and, in our tender hearts, we see ourselves as faceless and nameless. Our lives don’t consist of grand gestures and our deaths will not be glorious or dramatic—they’ll just happen. Movies tell us the hero deserves a story; the faceless do not.
Sure, Warren Oates is a loser. Not as big a loser as you—spending your time judging losers to make yourself feel like a big man.
Warren Oates is the patron saint of the disappointed. Warren Oates of the Eternal Slouch. Even when he self-consciously draws himself to his full height, he can’t disguise the internal slouch. Watching, we know: all attempts to rise above his station are doomed from the start.
He doesn’t have a leading man’s face; yet both Peckinpah and Hellman gave him lead roles and it’s not hard to see why. He carries the kind of dogged, resigned perseverance they were looking for in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Cockfighter. The apotheosis of Warren Oates occurs in these two films. In an alternate universe—booze-soaked and lurid, in sweaty dark cities where movies only play at midnight—they would have made him a star.
There’s resignation in him, but not surrender. Oates is the kind of guy who just keeps getting up after hard blows, who won’t stay down, but who couldn’t say exactly what he’s fighting for or why. The kind of guy who knows he won’t win.
Cockfighter and Alfredo Garcia articulate a masculinity that isn’t performance, yet still rests in the shadow of the ideal. This is not the Man with No Name, the quiet yet all-powerful figure of Clint Eastwood movies, not a character consumed with justice, or revenge. Frank bears Jack no ill will, even after he loses everything in the initial bet. When, later in the film, Jack tells Frank he’s married the former girlfriend—the girlfriend acquired in the bet—Frank smiles and shakes his hand.
The handshake in Cockfighter is an entire conversation. It’s the most physical contact allowed between men. Unless they’re fighting. Watch how Oates thinks for a second, then slides his hand toward Jack, across the length of his own body, as if that contact gathers a personal force he wants to pass on.
Listen, baby. Warren Oates coulda died back in Mexico City or TJ without knowing what it was all about but now he’s got a chance—a ticket—and he’s not gonna blow it. Warren Oates didn’t ask for this life, but he ain’t running. He’s gonna play the cards he’s dealt. He ain’t gonna fold.
Alfredo Garcia, on the other hand, is a fever dream of despair and revenge that seems to derive directly from an airless strata of male fear. When Bennie goes in search of Elita’s killers, exacting revenge doesn’t make him more of a man, it makes him less, even as he becomes more human. Every conflict comes to the surface of his body, all the weight becomes visible. The film is a story of what it’s like to disappoint everyone, not only yourself, but most especially those you love, as you drag them along the jagged trail of your half-assed dreams.
Oates enters this scene as the anti-man, neither John Wayne, nor Alan Ladd or Jimmy Stewart. After Elita dies, he continues with his mission, though it serves no purpose and won’t benefit him in any way. It’s not noble or moral; it’s just that once he starts something, he finishes it. He asserts himself against all odds, which is how Peckinpah liked to present himself in relation to the film industry.
There’s a near rape scene in Alfredo Garcia that is queasy in a particular 1970’s way. Bennie and Elita decide to camp for the night under the stars, but their idyll is interrupted by two bearded bikers. One decides to rape Elita while Bennie is held at gunpoint by his friend.
“Don’t fight, Bennie,” Elita tells him as she’s led away. “I’ve been on this road before. You don’t know the way.”
Away from camp, the biker rips her clothes, exposing her breasts. The two stare at each other; Elita’s expression isn’t completely hostile. The biker wanders away from her and we’re unsure whether he’s sad, confused. Elita follows him. His pain, manifested in his desire to rape her, has elicited her caring. She lies down half-naked beside him and kisses him.
Everything about this scene is misogynist, infuriating, and dubious; though Isela Vega plays it so well we’re forced to consider its truth for an instant. This instant of consideration implicates us, the audience. In this world, women exist to comfort men, or entertain them.
Women never truly arrive within this ecosystem of masculinity. They may orbit, like buzzing flies, but they cannot come to rest. In the films of the previous generations, women mostly existed to be married or rescued. In the 70’s, filmmakers seem confused by their role. Often, a woman’s autonomy leads them to abandon the main character, or else they submit and lose what autonomy they had.
When Frank unites with his old girlfriend Mary Elizabeth (Patricia Pearcy), she allows him to seduce her just so far, but she tells him she can’t wait for him any longer. We know what perhaps she nor Frank fully know—that he will never settle down. He attempts reconciliation the only way he knows how: by inviting her to the championship cockfight. He believes if she can just experience the thing he cares about most, she can’t help but understand. It doesn’t work out that way.
Oates’ characters live at the ass end of masculinity, and they knows it. He’s not anyone’s white knight. He’s never going to save the day. And he’s not going to get a job at the feed store or the bank and come home every day to Mary Elizabeth and a brood of little Franks. The goals of the previous generations don’t make a difference—maybe they were lies all along—and the only response remaining for a man is to find the one thing that does matter to him. It will never be a woman.
Warren Oates doesn’t need you. He can go his own way. Aw, look. He knows he’s not the best-looking guy in the world, but maybe together you and he could make something out of this one stinkin life. In Mexico, maybe. Or Alaska.
Hellman, Willeford, and Peckinpah had been raised on hours upon hours of stoic men doing heroic things. Working within their genres, they were attempting to reveal hidden layers of the male psyche. Their characters are wounded and ugly, self-pitying and self-destroying; these are stories of men who have so little control of their lives that they throw everything they have at the one thing they might control.
The films are made from the stasis of a particular psychological state: the place of observation without comment when we must attend our every failing and vice, allowing them to enter the light so they can be seen without trying to restrain them. The films evoke a certain core desperation; the desperation in seeing who and what we really are and not being able to turn away.
And, they are sometimes repulsive: the Hellman film because it includes footage of actual cockfighting, the Peckinpah because it seems to emerge directly from a pitch-black male unconscious.
Their attitudes toward women, especially, articulate a dark heart of masculinity that is very real. The scenes with women—scenes of betrayal and abuse, scenes in brothels, scenes of casual humiliation—exist to put ‘real’ masculinity in front of the audience, as if to say: This is what your heroes were doing behind closed doors.
Repulsive as they are, I want movies like this made, not from a judgmental ivory tower, but from the places where they are the most deeply felt, not as apologia but articulation. Both movies are bereft of judgment, burrowing into darknesses in the male psyche without apologizing, because apology is a form of self-absolution and neither filmmaker sees absolution as important. Or even possible.
There aint nothing sacred about a hole in the ground or any body that’s in it.
Hellman’s film portrays a quiet man leading his moderate life while Peckinpah gives us a man loudly negotiating his own hell. At the center of both is Warren Oates. Unassuming but difficult to ignore, he plods on; a man living his life the best he knows how and apologizing to (almost) no one.
Oates is the guy walking by, the guy in the background, the guy on the outskirts of the heroic act. He stands for all of us who aren’t handsome enough or strong enough or virile enough to be the hero, and who know it.
In his silence, Oates never appears stoic—he manages to let us in on his feelings and thoughts without saying a word. He’s not impassive and inscrutable, but vulnerable and expressive.
He has a stillness and even if that stillness arises from resignation, it’s there nonetheless, an alternative to the façade of toughness and certainty actors of the previous generations evinced which passed for stillness. His certainty is flawed, human; it feels real. We can see that Warren Oates isn’t sure about much—that what he is sure about might change—and that’s just fine by him.
Warren Oates has a code of honor but hell if he’s gonna explain it to you. I mean, do what you want. Warren Oates doesn’t give a fuck.
Steve Mitchell has been published in CRAFT Literary, entropy, december magazine, Southeast Review, and Contrary, among others. His novel, Cloud Diary, is published by C&R Press. His book of short stories is The Naming of Ghosts from Press 53. He is a winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Prize and the Lorian Hemingway International Short Story Prize. He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC. Find him at: www.clouddiary.org
