by Sid Holt
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I ran into this hatred for dependency in an online discussion of the police killing of a homeless man in San Francisco in April. More than a hundred messages into a fairly civil discourse started by a witness to the shooting, a commenter erupted,
I’m sick of people like you that think homeless people who can’t take care of themselves and their families have left them for us taxpaying citizens to care for think they have freedom. Once you can’t take care of or support yourself, and expect others to carry your burden, you have lost freedom. Wake up.
The same commenter later elaborated, “Have you ever owed money? Freedom lost. You owe someone. It’s called personal responsibility.”
Everyone on that neighborhood forum, including the writer, likely owed rent to a landlord or mortgage payments to a bank, making them more indebted than the homeless in their tents. If you’re housed in any American city, you also benefit from a host of services, such as water and sanitation and the organizations overseeing them, as well as from traffic lights and transit rules and building codes—the kind of stuff taxes pay for. But if you forget what you derive from the collective, you can imagine that you owe it nothing and can go it alone.
All this would have made that commenter’s tirade incoherent if its points weren’t so familiar. This is the rhetoric of modern conservatives: freedom is a luxury that wealth affords you; wealth comes from work; those who don’t work, never mind the cause, are undeserving. If freedom and independence are the ideal, dependence is not merely disdained; it’s furiously loathed. In her novelistic paean to free enterprise Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand called dependents parasites and looters. “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency,” said one of Rand’s admirers, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the man lately charged with saving the soul of conservatism from Trumpist apostasy.
The modern right may wish that every man were an island, entire of himself, but no one is wholly independent. You can’t survive without taking air into your lungs, you didn’t give birth to or raise yourself, you won’t bury yourself, and in between you won’t produce most of the goods and services you depend on to live. Your gut is full of microorganisms, without which you could not digest all the plants and animals, likely grown by other people, on which you rely to survive. We are nodes on intricate systems, synapses snapping on a great collective brain; we are in it together, for better or worse.
• • •
There is, of course, such a thing as society, and you’re inside it. Beyond that, beneath it and above and around and within it and us, there is such a thing as ecology, the systems within which our social systems exist and with which it often clashes.
Ecological thinking articulates the interdependence and interconnectedness of all things. This can be a beautiful dream of symbiosis when you’re talking about how, say, a particular species of yucca depends on a particular moth to pollinate it, and how the larvae of that moth depend on the seeds of that yucca for their first meals. Or it can be a nightmare when it comes to how toxic polychlorinated biphenyls found their way to the Arctic, where they concentrated in human breast milk and in top-of-the-food-chain carnivores such as polar bears. John Muir, wandering in the Yosemite in 1869, put it this way: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
This traditional worldview—for a long time, it was called conservative and stood in contrast to liberal individualism—could be seen as mystical or spiritual, but the accuracy of its description of natural systems within what we now call the biosphere is borne out by modern science. If you kill off the wolves in Yellowstone, elk populations will explode and many other plant and animal species will suffer; if you spray DDT on crops, then the stuff does the job you intended of killing off pests, but it will also, as Rachel Carson told us in 1962, kill the birds who would otherwise keep many insects and rodents in check.
All this causes great trouble for the ideology of isolation. It interferes with the right to maximum individual freedom, a freedom not to be bothered by others’ needs. Which is why modern conservatives so insistently deny the realities of ecological interconnectedness, refusing to recognize that when you add something to or remove an element from an environment, you alter the whole in ways that may come back to bite you. The usual argument in defense of this pesticide or that oil platform is that impact does not spread, that the item in question does not become part of a far-reaching system, and sometimes—often, nowadays—that that far-reaching system does not itself exist.
No problem more clearly demonstrates the folly of individualist thinking—or more clearly calls for a systematic response—than climate change. The ideologues of isolation are doubly challenged by this fact. They reject the proposed solutions to climate change because they bristle at the need for limits on production and consumption, for regulation, for cooperation between industry and government, and for international partnership. In 2011, Naomi Klein attended a meeting at the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank, and produced a landmark essay about why conservatives are so furiously opposed to doing anything about climate change. She quotes a man from the Competitive Enterprise Institute who declared, “No free society would do to itself what this agenda requires.… The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.” “Most of all, however,” she reported, “I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.”
On a more fundamental level, the very idea of climate change is offensive to isolationists because it tells us more powerfully and urgently than anything ever has that everything is connected, that nothing exists in isolation. What comes out of your tailpipe or your smokestack or your leaky fracking site contributes to the changing mix of the atmosphere, where carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases cause the earth to retain more of the heat that comes from the sun, which doesn’t just result in what we used to call global warming but will lead to climate chaos.
As the fact of climate change has become more and more difficult to deny, the ideologues of isolation deny instead our responsibility for the problem and the possibility that we are capable of acting collectively to do anything about it. “Climate change occurs no matter what,” Paul Ryan said a few years ago. “The question is, can and should the federal government do something about it? And I would argue the federal government, with all its tax and regulatory schemes, can’t.” Of course it can, but he prefers that it not do so, which is why he denies human impact as a cause and human solutions as a treatment.
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What keeps the ideology of isolation going is going to extremes. If you begin by denying social and ecological systems, then you end in denying the reality of facts, which are after all part of a network of systematic relationships between language, physical reality, and the record, regulated by the rules of evidence, truth, grammar, word meaning, and so forth. You deny the relationship between cause and effect, evidence and conclusion, or rather you imagine both as products on the free market, which one can produce and consume according to one’s preferences. You deregulate meaning.
Absolute freedom means you can have any truth that you like, and isolation’s ideologues like truths that keep free-market fundamentalism going. You can be like that unnamed senior adviser (probably Karl Rove), who in a mad moment of Bush-era triumphalism told Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Reality, in this worldview, is a product subject to market rules or military rules, and if you are dominant in the marketplace or rule the empire, your reality can push aside the other options. “Freedom” is just another word for nothing left to limit your options. And this is how the ideology of isolation becomes nihilism, trying to kill the planet and most living things on it with the confidence born of total dis
connection.
Giantess
The radical is so often imagined as the marginal that sometimes the truly subversive escapes detection just by showing up in a tuxedo instead of a T-shirt or a ski mask. Take Giant, the 1956 film directed by George Stevens. It stars Elizabeth Taylor and features three queer men, Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Sal Mineo, who uneasily orbit one another in ways that seem only partly about their cinematic roles.
This is what caught my eye the first time I saw Giant. It was the thirtieth-anniversary screening at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, the great 1,400-seat dream palace where, from my midteens on, I learned from the sighs and groans and snickers of the gay men around me in the dark to notice homoerotic subtext, to delight in women with verve, and to appreciate camp and bitchiness and cliché.
In the film, Elizabeth Taylor plays that rarest of joys, a woman who breaks the rules, triumphs, and enjoys herself rather than winding up dead or deserted or defeated, as too many female rebels have in too many movies. The year before my first viewing, Hudson had died of AIDS, and Taylor had begun advocating and fund raising for those with the then-untreatable and horrifically stigmatized disease. Her outspoken heroics in real life made her a little like the unconquered heroine she was in the movie.
Whenever I see a woman like that onscreen, I get revved up in a way that men who identify with Hollywood’s endless stream of action heroes must be all the time. Just watching Jennifer Lawrence walk down a Texas street like a classic gunslinger in the 2015 biopic Joy gave me a thrill I get maybe once a year. Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen was the hard drugs. Beyoncé’s recent videos have offered some of the same satisfaction, of a woman who slays and doesn’t stay down. Distaff invictus, lady with agency.
• • •
The second time I saw the film on the Castro’s huge screen, for its fortieth anniversary, I brought my own superb source of low-volume commentary, the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. He was dressed all in black leather and slumped down in his seat with a hangover. He kept murmuring, almost from the start, “Rebecca, I do not believe what I am seeing.”
Early in the film, Taylor’s Maryland debutante Leslie Lynnton simultaneously captivates and annoys Jordan Benedict II, the West Texas rancher played by Rock Hudson, the former by being a flirtatious and lovely woman, the latter by speaking her mind. Freudian motif alert: he’s come to buy a stallion—a gleaming black horse that she rides magnificently in the opening scene—from her father. At breakfast the morning after they meet, she tells him that she’s been up all night reading about his home state. He prepares to be flattered when she adds, “We really stole Texas! … I mean away from Mexico.”
It’s a demurely outrageous scene, complicated by the handsome African American butler whose nonplussed expression gets some camera attention along with Hudson’s choke on his toast. The film, made the year after Brown v. Board of Education and its little-remembered parallel case, Hernandez v. Texas, takes on race in Texas, a white and brown affair, though it leaves out the politics of being black in the South. It’s not a perfect polemic and falls within the suspect genre of racial justice as seen from the perspective of a white ally, but it’s nevertheless extraordinary for a blockbuster filmed while Martin Luther King Jr. was finishing graduate school and Rosa Parks was still giving up her seat.
We really stole Texas. It’s an amazing thing to say even now, and as an observation Elizabeth Taylor offers over breakfast to a cattle baron besotted with his homeland, it’s astonishing. The year that Guillermo and I watched Giant turn forty—1996—California was in the midst of an era of immigrant bashing, driven by various myths that shifted the burden of a brutal new economy from its lords and masters to its underclass. That year was also the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Mexican War, which ended two years later with the United States seizing Mexico’s northern half, the rich expanse from New Mexico to California that, had it remained in Mexican hands, might have led to a wildly different global geopolitics and, perhaps, poor Yankees sneaking across the border for jobs in the superpower to the southwest. (Texas, of course, had been stolen earlier.) Amnesia has long been an important component of the ideology of demonizing Latino immigrants and residents, from the Gold Rush to California governor Pete Wilson in the 1990s to the current Republican presidential nominee.
But anyway: Jordan Benedict II survives the truth from the mouth of a beautiful woman, and a scene or two later they’re newlyweds speeding home in his private railcar. First seen riding to hounds across the rolling green countryside of the Mid-Atlantic, Leslie is shocked by life on the scorched grasslands of west Texas. But she adjusts to her surroundings. And makes adjustments to them: she starts meddling with the treatment of Latino workers on the half-million-acre ranch, having found herself in not only an arid country but an apartheid one. There her husband rules like Abraham in the land of Canaan. Mighty are his herds, vast his lands. Among other things, the film seems to propose that the great division in the United States is not necessarily the famous Civil War configuration of North-South but rather East-West, with differences of manners, histories, ecologies, and scale. It’s clear that Leslie thinks that meeting people who speak Spanish means she’s arrived in another country.
The horse Leslie rode with confidence in that opening scene has come with her, so she’s identified with the stud, the stallion, the wild force—a nice subversion of the idea that the East represents ethereal inaction. In an early scene, her husband and sister-in-law insist she’s too delicate to stay on her spirited steed or out on the roundup under a broiling sun. They dispatch her in a vehicle driven by James Dean’s character, layabout handyman Jett Rink. Of course, he falls for her, in part because she treats him with gracious respect (in part because she’s the most gorgeous thing the world has ever seen).
Leslie’s brusque sister-in-law, who lives and breathes ranching and bullying, manages to kill herself and the stallion by digging in her spurs and fighting the power of a horse used to kinder riders. She breaks his leg; he breaks her skull; she expires on a sofa; he is put down off camera. But before the film gets to her death scene; a resurrection thread starts. Leslie gets Jett to stop the car at the barrio of shacks in which the ranch’s Latino workers live, and there she finds a sick mother and baby. When the doctor comes to tend to her dying sister-in-law, Leslie violates the segregation of the place by making him do something more useful—save the life of an infant named Ángel Obregón.
It’s a freak: a wildly successful mid-1950s Technicolor film about race, class, and gender from a radical perspective, with a charismatic, unsubjugated woman at the center. True, there were other left-wing movies made back then. Salt of the Earth, also told from the perspective of a strong woman, had been released in 1954, but it was a diligent, black-and-white film about a New Mexico miners’ strike that Hollywood soon blacklisted; the lavishly colorful Giant was nominated for numerous Oscars, won for best director, and raked in huge box office. It reached a lot of people, which is what we would like propaganda and advocacy to do; Giant suggests that pleasure helps (as do budgets).
• • •
Works of art that can accompany you through the decades are mirrors in which you can see yourself, wells in which you can keep dipping. They remind you that what you bring to the work of art is as important as what it brings to you. They can become registers of how you’ve changed. If Giant is a different film with each decade, perhaps that’s because I am a different person, focused on different things in the world around me.
It took another decade for me to recognize that Giant is also about a marriage, one that is strong but not easy, between two people who survive profound disagreements with forbearance and persistence. It’s called Giant after the scale of things in Texas, and Rock Hudson is a mountain of a man who looms over everyone, but it could have been called Giantess. Taylor’s Leslie Benedict possesses a moral stature and a fearlessness that overshadow all else: she tells off powerful men, acts on behalf of the people who are supposed to
be invisible, and generally fights authority. She doesn’t lose much, either, though she accommodates. Her husband mostly reacts and tries to comprehend. Virginia Woolf once remarked that Mary Wollstonecraft’s lover Gilbert Imlay had, in involving himself with the great feminist revolutionary, tried to catch a minnow “and hooked a dolphin, and the creature rushed him through the waters till he was dizzy.” Jordan Benedict is often dizzy, but unlike Imlay he never unhooks himself.
Watching Jordan absorb the impact of this relationship—the realization that you might not get what you want or know what to do next or agree with the person you love—is sobering, and Hudson plays it well, with complex emotions moving across his big smooth slab of a face like clouds moving across the prairie. “You knew what a frightful girl I was when you married me,” Leslie tells Jordan at one point. There are a lot of movies about how to get into a relationship, about falling in love, and some about falling out, but not many about keeping at it through the years.
How long does it take to see something, to know someone? When we put in years, we realize how little we grasped at the start, even when we thought we knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces pressuring us, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is really a movie about staying with it. This year, at the sixtieth anniversary, the familiar joys remained, but I noticed nuances of the plot that had escaped me before.
The worst thing imaginable happens to our protagonists: they have a son who grows up to become Dennis Hopper. Jordan Benedict III is a red-haired, uneasy, shifty, anxious man who as a child feared horses and as an adult wants to be a doctor and seems to become one remarkably quickly. Without his parents’ knowledge, he also marries Juana Guerra, a Latina nurse, played by the Mexican actress Elsa Cárdenas.