MovieChat Forums > Meek's Cutoff (2011) Discussion > "Social Justice" circa 1845 and the Endi...

"Social Justice" circa 1845 and the Ending

posted 8 years ago by jmiller1918
5 replies | jump to latest

This may have been broached before, but a quick scan of topics didn't find it for me. (Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the film).

I won't say it's the "only" theme (others being the slowing down of time to place the viewer in a series of long, difficult days with no entertainment or much diversion; the idea of the Western Migration, etc.) but a major theme seems very much a 2010 inflection, that being a liberal sensibility.

Emily is the primary member of the party who we see and identify with. The male migrants are somewhat reduced to a mostly diffident and doubt-ridden lot. Meek himself is presented as a blustering male know-it-all, but I will credit the director for pulling back from a full-on stereotype of an ignorant chauvinist. The character of Meek comes dangerously close, though.

Emily seems to be the first to question Meek's leadership. We even get a brief debate between Meek and Emily with the word "gender" employed by Meek, after he confronts her over her dislike/mistrust of him! The chaos/destruction metaphor was interesting, but I had a hard time believing it came from the mouth of fur-trapper from the mid-19th Century frontier.

The receptiveness of Emily to the Indian, and her acts of kindness, seem to signal a more subtle understanding of "the other" than the White men are capable of. In fact, Meek's reaction to Emily's kindness to the Indian seemed based on a fear of potential miscegenation and jealousy; i.e., a "racist" response.

Admittedly, some of the other men are also in favor of sparing the Indian's life; and one of the women becomes paranoid and perhaps "xenophobic". These developments keep the film from overly telegraphing its Social Justice message.

But the set-piece of the film is undoubtedly when Emily levels a rifle at Meek to save the Indian. This standoff takes several long moments, and can't be seen as anything other than a White woman protecting a non-White indigenous person from the wrath/inaction of ignorant or hateful or cowardly White men. After this "showdown", Meek's dwindling authority is clearly gone altogether. Emily's husband approves her action, but in a way that almost underlines his impotence and resignation.

Permit me to doubt that a woman would have taken so bold an action, pre-empting or derailing the deliberation of the men in the group at this period in time. As the trip progresses, however, the men grow weaker and more unsure, and only Emily and the Indian seem to have reserves of strength to draw on.

The much-discussed ending isn't really ambiguous. Meek himself acknowledges defeat, admitting that Emily, and even more so the Indian, are now in charge.

So we have the eclipse of White, male hierarchy, and the ascendance of a female/Native alliance. That's the story, folks. It doesn't need to continue on from there. The ending wasn't an "art house" trick or b-llsh-tt-ng moment of pretense. The message was delivered, anything after that would be pure anticlimax.

[–] kinglet 8 years ago

"So we have the eclipse of White, male hierarchy, and the ascendance of a female/Native alliance. That's the story, folks. It doesn't need to continue on from there. The ending wasn't an "art house" trick or b-llsh-tt-ng moment of pretense. The message was delivered, anything after that would be pure anticlimax."

Kelly Reichardt's movies do have a few themes she comes back to but the "eclipse of white male hierarchy, and the ascendance of a female/Native alliance" is too narrow a reading here. Rather she likes to show what happens when the authority figure or narrator is unreliable, or how people refuse to accept an information vacuum and will inevitably make up a story to suit their circumstances, even if they use bad information to do so.

In the movie Emily Tetherow (Ibba Tetherow in real life) embodies both the status of women at the time and the plight of every member of the Tetherow group post-Fort Boise. As a woman she has few legal rights, and as a member of the group she has as little access to good information as anyone. Repeatedly the men gather to make important decisions while the women wait at a distance, unable to hear what's being said and consulted not at all, even though they are full partners in the endeavor. Yet it's her leveraging of the only possible source they have, the Indian, that helps lessen their risk of dying in their tracks.

Solomon Tetherow was a capable man, experienced in cross-country travel, living off the land, running riverboats, and getting along with others. Starting out as captain of the journey, he had already lost authority over most of the people he started with when large groups split into smaller ones at Fort Boise. I thought Will Patton did a good job of portraying him as a strong man who was slowly realizing his wife had independent ideas and was worth listening to. It was an interesting look at how unusual circumstances brought out an equality of minds not seen before in their marriage. It did make me wonder what the rest of their long married life was like.

By 1845 Stephen Meek was slipping into the shadow of his more famous, more established, and more competent younger brother, Joseph. Why he thought his fur trapping experience in the streams of NE Oregon's greener valleys, and his knowledge of the original route through there would somehow translate to finding his way through the High Desert is one of history's mysteries. At the very least he had to know no one fur trapped that area because of the lack of water. Perhaps he thought forging a new emigrant route would make him as famous as Joseph. To total rookies like the folks who ran into him at Fort Boise, he must have seemed like a sure bet.

As for the ending, no one is really "in charge". It's also not a real ending as we're really only seeing a chapter of a much longer story. In this chapter there is only a situational understanding that maybe, briefly, anyone's idea can be the right one. In real life it was an Indian who got them close to the Deschutes River and young Indian men who helped them cross it farther north.

The Tetherows made it to the green Willamette Valley where they built a mill and farmed. One of their surviving sons, along with other white men, helped draft the first Oregon state constitution in 1857. It both banned slavery, making Oregon a free state, and dictated that "No negro, Chinaman or mullato shall have the right of suffrage". These men also debated women's suffrage, but tossed it out altogether as they felt it opened the door to the very minorities they didn't want voting.

Ibba Tetherow never lived long enough to get suffrage herself. In real life such things are links on the same long chain, but in movie life that's another story altogether.

[–] jmiller1918 8 years ago

Thank you for a very interesting and informative post! I appreciate the level of historical detail you bring with you. Your angle on the reading of the film is certainly every bit as well-informed.

I will only mildly quibble on the inevitable "political" aspects of the film.

You said:

"Kelly Reichardt's movies do have a few themes she comes back to but the "eclipse of white male hierarchy, and the ascendance of a female/Native alliance" is too narrow a reading here. Rather she likes to show what happens when the authority figure or narrator is unreliable, or how people refuse to accept an information vacuum and will inevitably make up a story to suit their circumstances, even if they use bad information to do so."

While I don't think what you wrote is "wrong", I still feel the all-but-unavoidable issues of social empowerment and hierarchy are too big to be fully contained by a characterization of the drama being derived from uncertainty and the protagonists efforts to fill the information void. Of course uncertainty is a primary theme running all the way through the film- a constant shifting of who we choose to place our faith in, and a nagging realization that the sure knowledge that is needed to ensure survival is lacking or elusive.

But the authority issue I focused on is interwoven with the uncertainty aspects you highlight. And since the film is a product of our modern culture, I feel the politics are omnipresent, whether they were intended to be center-stage or not. When race and gender dynamics are present to the extent they were in this film, I feel that the inherent anxiety our culture feels about those topics will end up with the weight of interpretation or ethical speculation on them. e.g., a film about the exact same scenario, but with all the characters being comprised of White males, perhaps with an intense rivalry for leadership, would retain all the uncertainty aspects while remaining presumable free of socio-political implications.

As I said, that isn't to say your take is wrong, but I feel both our takeaways are valid, and would stick to the conclusions I drew upon first viewing.

Nonetheless, I am appalled at the level of miscomprehension this film engenders in its audience. The people who thought "there was no ending" are missing the boat altogether. That was what really prompted me to write my comment. Thanks again for the intelligent and sensitive reply.

[–] kinglet 8 years ago

Yikes, civil discourse on IMDb? Keep it up and no one will recognize the place!

You wrote:

"But the authority issue I focused on is interwoven with the uncertainty aspects you highlight. And since the film is a product of our modern culture, I feel the politics are omnipresent, whether they were intended to be center-stage or not."

I think the politics, or attitudes we bring to what we watch, will certainly be present as you say. We all take in stories through our own filters. For viewers with "inherent anxiety" about race and gender issues, this movie will seem to be telling a certain kind of story, and certain events as this plot unfolded definitely brought my own thoughts on those topics into my mind. For viewers with different attitudes or life experiences it's going to seem like a somewhat different story. The different viewpoints are part of what I enjoy whenever I have a chance to join a film discussion session.

A truly failed movie is one that generates nothing, that seems to have no thought of any kind behind it. It's an hour and a half or two hours of wallpaper. A more satisfying movie will have me thinking about it after I've seen it. As Siskel and Ebert used to say, it's when the characters live on in your mind after the movie is over.

"As I said, that isn't to say your take is wrong, but I feel both our takeaways are valid, and would stick to the conclusions I drew upon first viewing."

Ditto. And thanks for the grownup conversation.

As for the folks on Meek's cutoff, the best overall grasp of what happened has only been pieced together by historians with access to surviving journals and diaries kept by individuals in different Companies, as each group called itself. Historians of the Oregon Trail and old accounts of wagon train trips in general have discovered that men kept extremely boring notes; "Made 9 miles today. Found good grass, water, fixt broke waggin wheel." Women kept details, made lists of all the Company's members, who was born, who died, what there was to hunt, eat, and do along the way. Scenery descriptions, songs sung, children's questions, the mood of the group, and the richness of the stories is found mostly in their writings. Some were barely literate but determined to document the biggest adventure of their lives.

One Meek's Cutoff diary preserved and posted online by descendants is this one:

http://www.oregonpioneers.com/CooleyDiary.htm

The Transcribed Diary of Eli Casey Cooley as he came across the Oregon Trail and the Meek Cutoff in 1845.

By Michael F. and Mary Lou Cooley for the Officer-Cooley Family Association

November 2004

The Cooley's had split off from Captain Tetherow's group. Eli Cooley eventually identified Solomon Tetherow near the Deschutes River from a distance. Michael and Mary Cooley did good work in comparing their ancestor's diary with others so as to get a bigger picture. They correctly note how direction-impaired people got as they became dehydrated and exhausted, which would have affected Stephen Meek too.

The best single collection of wagon train diaries that I know of is available from the University of Nebraska Press. They published collected works in 11 or 12 books starting with Volume 1, 1840-1849. Lots of libraries and genealogy societies have at least one or two of them, plus they're available from the U of N and on Amazon.com. Probably other places too.

The film doesn't exaggerate the boredom of the trip nor the difficulties. Solomon and Ibba Tetherow had already buried one of their twin boys in the Nebraska Territory before reaching Fort Boise. The exact number of people who died just along what's now the Oregon portion will never be known for sure as there was no centralized record keeping in 1845. But it was quite a few. The fear of Indians desecrating graves and wild animals digging up bodies prompted the trekkers to bury their loved ones at the head of the line so everyone could drive their stock and wagons over the grave, compacting and obliterating it.

And here we are writing about it using 1s and 0s flying through cyberspace. We have it so easy.

[–] jmiller1918 8 years ago

Thanks for the links and interesting post. I can tell you love history as much as I do.

Although something of a cliché', it really is tempting to compare the wagon trains to space travel. In reality, probably far more statistically dangerous than space travel.

You make several interesting observations about the history behind the film. Thanks for posting!

[–] liscarkat (16599) 4 years ago

Well, you can probably take any film or novel and read your agenda (or the agenda you don't like) into it. It's just postmodern deconstructive criticism. I think Emily threatened Meek because she was a decent person and couldn't stand by and watch someone get murdered. I think Meek caved at the end because he finally realized he was lost and their only chance was to follow the Indian. Sometimes stuff is actually as simple as it looks, and isn't always about the patriarchy, racism, etc. But if it excites you more to have it that way, go for it.