The horse Taylor/Leslie rode with confidence in that opening scene has come with her, so that she’s identified with the stud, the stallion, the wild force—a nice subversion of the idea that the East or femininity means ethereal inaction. In an early scene, her husband and sister-in-law insist she’s too delicate to stay on the spirited steed or out on the roundup under a broiling sun. They dispatch her in the vehicle driven by James Dean’s character, layabout handyman Jett Rink, who 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).
The brusque sister-in-law, who lives and breathes ranching and bullying, manages to kill herself and the horse by digging in her spurs and fighting the power of a creature used to kinder riders. She breaks his leg, he breaks her neck; she expires on a sofa, he gets put down off camera. But the film gets to her death scene a little later; a resurrection thread starts before it. Taylor gets Dean to stop at the barrio of shacks in which the ranch’s Latino workers live and finds a sick mother and baby. When the doctor comes to oversee the death of her sister-in-law, she violates the segregation of the place by making him go do something more useful—save the life of the infant Angel Obregon (who is played by Mineo as a young man later in the film).
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 films made then that were further to the left. Salt of the Earth, also told from the perspective of a strong woman, had been released in 1954, but it was a diligent film about a New Mexico miners’ strike, in black and white, that was suppressed; the lavishly colorful Giant got nominated for numerous Oscars and won for best director, raked in huge box office, and generally reached a lot of people. Which is what we would like propaganda and advocacy to do; maybe Giant suggests that pleasure helps get you there (as do budgets).
It took another decade for me to recognize that Giant is also a serious film about a marriage 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 everything else, but it could have been called Giantess. Taylor’s Leslie Benedict possesses a moral stature and fearlessness that overshadow all else: she tells off powerful men, reaches out to the people who are supposed to be her invisible underlings, and generally fights the power. 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 until he was dizzy.” Hudson’s Jordan Benedict is often dizzy when he finds himself married to a warrioress for race, class, and gender justice, but unlike Imlay he never unhooks himself.
Watching Hudson absorb the impact of a relationship—the realization you might not get what you want, or know what to do next, or agree with the person you love—is sobering, and he plays it well, with complex emotions moving across his big smooth slab of a face like clouds and weather moving across the prairie. “You knew I was a proud unpleasant girl when you married me,” Leslie tells him the morning after she’s broken some more rules by butting into in a political conversation between her husband and his cronies, the power brokers and election-fixers of the Texas plains. There are a lot of movies about how to get into a relationship, a marriage, about falling in love, and some about falling out, but not many about keeping at it through the years. They quarrel, make up, endure, adapt, beget.
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 it’s as much what you bring to the work of art as what it brings to you that matters, and they become registers of how you’ve changed. If Giant is a different film each decade that I watch it, perhaps that’s because I am a different person focused on different things in the world around me. Not that I ever gave up on the murmured lessons from the dark.
How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it. When I watched Giant earlier this year, for the film’s sixtieth anniversary, the marriage plot was familiar, the power of Taylor’s Leslie Benedict remained a joy, and I noticed nuances that had escaped me before.
The worst imaginable thing happens to our protagonists: they have a son who grows up to become Dennis Hopper. Hopper’s character, 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. He also marries a frumpy Latina nurse, played by Mexican actress Elsa Cárdenas, without his parents’ knowledge. Guillermo told me when we watched the film twenty years ago that Cárdenas, a medium-size star in her native Mexico, was far more glamorous than she was allowed to be in this film, and that like all the Latino characters in the film she seemed to be smeared with what I think he called “shoe-polish brown” makeup to make brown people browner.
Hopper’s character refuses to contemplate taking over the half-million-acre ranch, and though one of his two sisters loves ranching, she breaks her father’s heart a little more by telling him she wants a small place where she and her cowhand husband can try new scientific methods. In the scene where Hudson’s character realizes that he has begotten children but no dynasty or heirs, Mineo’s Angel Obregon, acknowledged a few scenes earlier as the best man in the place, lingers in the background of the scene. I noticed this for the first time and realized the film seemed thus to suggest that if only Hudson’s character could overcome his racism, a true heir was at hand, the man Taylor had saved from death years before. Instead, Angel goes unrecognized and unacknowledged and comes home from the Second World War in a coffin. His promise, like that of so many others, has been squandered.
The film can also be considered as a saga about the shift from cattle to oil economies, and Jett Rink goes from slinking ranch hand to tycoon when his little inholding starts spurting fossil fuel. But it’s at least as much about the shift from widely tolerated segregation and discrimination to a nascent civil rights era, and Cárdenas, as Hopper’s bride and Hudson’s daughter-in-law, is the impetus for the battles that draw in her father-in-law in for the film’s finale. At Rink’s new hotel, the hairdressers refuse to do her hair; then, at the diner where she, her son, her husband, and his parents stop on the way back, the chef insults her. An ostentatiously humble Latino trio (the actors look as though they rode with Pancho Villa) is ejected from the establishment. Hudson, decades into the storyline, hours into the movie, finally rises to the occasion and punches out the diner’s huge chef, who punches him back more effectually. Hudson loses the fight and wins Taylor’s admiration for slugging his way into civil rights activism, a rebel with a cause.
This time around I realized that gently, slowly, the movie has denied the patriarch every form of patriarchal power: his wife does not obey and often does not respect him; his children refuse his plans for them, especially the son who refused to carry on the ranching legacy and who marries a Mexican or Chicana (or a Tejana, a native Texan of Mexican descent; the film is a little muddled about the distinctions). Ranching itself ceases to be the great central, pivotal industry that defines Texas; oil has overtaken it and changed everything. Jordan Benedict II, one of the biggest ranchers in Texas, has been denied all the forms of power that matter most to him, the film tells us, and that’s just fine and well, for him as much as anyone, once he gets over it. The shift is not just from cows to crude but from patriarchy to some
kind of open, negotiated reshuffling of everything, the contested contemporary era.
Part of the astonishment, I realized as I watched the movie this last time, was that this is a film about a man who found he couldn’t control anything at all, and he’s not Job and this is not a jeremiad. That would presume that he should control things, and that it’s sad when he doesn’t. It would propose that kings should not be deposed. This film postulates the opposite: the king has fallen—as he does literally in the diner—and everything is fine. That’s what makes it radical.
If only white men in general were as graceful about the changes as Jordan Benedict II is in the end. I’ve always seen the film as about Taylor’s outsized character, but maybe it’s an anti-bildungsroman about the coming of middle age and the surrendering of illusions, including the illusion of control. The insubordinate son, Jordan Benedict III, has presented him with a grandson to carry on the family name, Jordan Benedict IV, a brown child whose big brown eyes, I finally noticed, are the closing shot of the film. This, says Giant, is the future; get used to it.
Acknowledgments and Text Credits
That there is a war against women was my life growing up in a house full of male violence, thinking I would be safe if and when I left, which I did very young, only to find that now strangers on the streets menaced me. As I wrote in Wanderlust (2000): “It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness out of doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem.” I have tried to make it a public issue.
This war is so woven into our culture that it provokes little outrage and even little attention; isolated events make the news, but the overall pattern is too pervasive to be news. I have been trying to call attention to it by describing some of its impacts, enumerating them with sentences like this one about domestic violence: “It’s the number-one cause of injury to American women; of the two million injured annually, more than half a million of those injuries require medical attention, while about 145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Centers for Disease Control,” trying to understand what hate, fear, and entitlement lie behind the violence, and illuminating how the violence is only the more dramatic manifestation of a system that devalues, dehumanizes, and erases women. It’s been ugly work at times, reading countless trial transcripts, accounts of rape and murder, statistics on broken bodies and broken lives—but, as part of the project of changing the world, worth it.
My gratitude is to the feminist movement as a critical and pivotal part of the larger revolutions to make us all equal under the law and in our everyday lives, to guarantee rights and respect for everyone. I’m old enough to remember the ugly old world before there was recourse for domestic violence, acquaintance and date rape, and workplace sexual harassment (an ordinary part of my working experience in my teens), old enough to have seen the world change because of insight and organizing and intervention. I’m grateful to the individuals and collectives who delivered a new world in which we are more free and more equal, grateful to have had in recent years a small role in the work, which will not end soon. Nor will we go back, no matter how big the backlash.
I’m grateful to the older women I met who were the first unsubjugated, powerful, free women in my life: my father’s cousins Mary Solnit Clarke and June Solnit Sale, human rights activists since the 1940s and key members of the great, undercelebrated organization Women Strike for Peace from its outset in 1961; Carrie and Mary Dann, the Western Shoshone matriarchs whose land rights struggle I joined in 1992 for a few years of valiant effort and great adventure in eastern Nevada; a few years later, the feminist writer Lucy Lippard; then the great Susan Griffin; and many others. I’m grateful to the young women who are recharging feminism with new vigor and vision, including numerous great writers such as Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Mona Eltahawy, Caroline Criado-Perez, Brittney Cooper, Rebecca Traister, Adrienne Maree Brown, Emma Sulkowicz, and the women of Black Lives Matter, and many young women I’ve been blessed to meet because of these writings. I’m grateful to my peers, especially Astra Taylor and Marina Sitrin, fierce feminists, brilliant minds, and dear friends. I’m grateful to the many men who have become feminists, and grateful that we now understand that just as women can serve patriarchy, so can men and anyone rebel against it; grateful especially for the voices of many Black men who understand oppression wherever it shows up: Taj James, Elon James White, Teju Cole, Garnette Cadogan, and Jarvis Masters among them. Grateful to the gay men who have been great friends, allies, and sources of insight since I was thirteen, grateful to grow up in a city that has been a world capital of queer liberation. Grateful to the women in my family raising feminist children.
I’m grateful for the brilliance and dedication of Anthony Arnove, Haymarket’s editor, and for the beautiful editorial work of Caroline Luft; for the design genius of Abby Weintraub, who made the title Men Explain Things to Me into words so bold and clear that the small book served as a placard and provocation, a design we kept for Hope in the Dark and this book, which completes a trilogy that was always about hope as well as violence and struggle; and for the generous good work of Rory Fanning, Jim Plank, Julie Fain, and the rest of the Haymarket team; grateful for the readers who wanted to engage in this conversation about gender and power; grateful for the independent bookstores that have kept my books in reach of readers; grateful that books are still central to our lives, still the deepest way to engage with the thoughts of others in tranquility and solitude.
Special thanks to Christopher Beha, who brought me on as the Easy Chair columnist at Harper’s, where “The Mother of All Questions,” “Escape from the 5,000-Year-Old Suburb,” and “Giantess” were first published; to the Guardian editors who published several of these pieces, including “An Insurrectionary Year,” “One Year after Seven Deaths,” and “The Short Happy Recent History of the Rape Joke”; and to John Freeman and Jonny Diamond at Lithub, where the essays “80 Books No Woman Should Read,” “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” and “The Case of the Missing Perpetrator” first appeared.
Huge thanks to my longtime friend Paz de la Calzada, whose exquisite drawings invoke bodies, beauties, transgressions, and boundaries in subtle ways that enrich and deepen this book. And my friend Mary Beth Marks, one of the kindest and most radiant people I’ve ever been blessed to meet, a great lover of books, of water, of her many friends and her wife and brother and brother-in-law particularly, died suddenly as we were finishing this book, which opened with a dedication to the young people in my life; let it end in loving memory of her.
Artwork Credits
Artwork by Paz de la Calzada. All images by Paz de la Calzada, courtesy of the artist.
Paz de la Calzada is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Her site-specific drawings and installations create intricate labyrinths that provide a pathway from the public sphere into a contemplative realm, thus linking two very isolated worlds. The intricate lines and repetitive patterns of her HairScape drawings cohabitate and collaborate with surrounding architecture, reclaiming aspects of female beauty.
Paz has created temporary public art projects in the United States, India, Crete, and Spain, engaging with local communities and drawing inspiration from their stories.
www.pazdelacalzada.com
1. HairScape. Charcoal on Canvas. 46” x 40”
2. HairScape. Charcoal on Canvas. 56” x 54”
3. HairScape. Charcoal on Canvas. 24” x 26”
4. HairScape. Charcoal on Paper. 30” x 22”
5. HairScape. Charcoal on Paper. 30” x 22”
6. HairScape. Charcoal on Canvas. 20” x 18”
About the Author
© Adrian Mendoza
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, Weste
rn and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s and a regular contributor to the Guardian.
About Haymarket Books
Haymarket Books is a nonprofit, progressive book distributor and publisher, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. We believe that activists need to take ideas, history, and politics into the many struggles for social justice today. Learning the lessons of past victories, as well as defeats, can arm a new generation of fighters for a better world. As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.”
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