SELF is pleased to announce a movie night with Professor Garry Leonard on Sunday, November 29th. We will be watching and discussing Stagecoach, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne.
The event will go from 5-7pm (EST), and everyone is welcome in this informal setting!
Zoom Details:
Meeting ID: 843 4045 4699
Passcode: 196898
Prof. Leonard describes his interest in the film:
I want the depiction of the Native Americans in the movie to be part of the discussion: they seem to rise up out of the landscape without warning or reason, and disappear back into it just as mysteriously. No one seems to know when, or why, they attack, or when, and why, they stop. This says a lot about the "siege mentality" of the settlers as they make their way through a hostile, frightening land -- but in representing this, it demonizes the Natives as something sent from 'beyond' Christianity to test and threaten their resolve to be in this new, supposedly promised land. By seeing the Natives as emanations of the landscape, the frightened pioneers have something to shoot at and defeat, thereby appearing to "earn" their right to a land they are, in fact, first invading, then colonizing, and finally occupying. John Wayne's character, Ringo, also is just "found" in the middle of the desert. In stark contrast to the Natives, however, he emerges as a man of such integrity that he has an impeccable code beyond mere law that allows him to suggest he has infallible instincts for what America most needs. Trump is a very compromised form of this "cowboy" figure, but the figure has such mythic resonance, and Trump has such good instincts as a con-artist, that it has allowed him to form what nearly amounts to a cult following.
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