How Gaming Made Me Like Country Music

I've always liked to think that I'm flexible when it comes to musical, with a few genre exceptions. Country was one of them; maybe it was family vacations where the adults chose Garth Brooks CDs that did it for me, or maybe it was radio stations playing borderline racist Toby Keith songs. Sure, I liked bluegrass, but that was folk music, not country. I was a liberal middle-class city girl, and I knew I wasn't country's target audience. So be it- not all music works for all people.

And then it turned out I was wrong, thanks to a couple of supernatural western RPGs.

My groups have always liked to have a gaming soundtrack, put at low volume during the entire session or just climactic scenes; dragon-killing is even more fun with Nightwish on in the background. It's a common practice among roleplayers, and some game books even make suggestions as to what music you should listen to while playing. Such was the case with Dogs in the Vineyard.

I've mentioned this game before, but it's something of a noir-western where you play Mormon gunslingers battling demons of sin (who are either abstract concepts or physical monsters- our GM always chose the latter.) The book reccomended putting on some spirituals and murder ballads on while playing, with maybe a little Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. My group went through our music collections and contributed songs for the playlist; Johnny Cash was there, Ennio Morricone was there, the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack was prominent, and a few tracks came from Nick Cave's album of murder ballads.

Johnny Cash was better than I expected; after listening to God's Gonna Cut You Down, I understood why he had such a following. The game was lots of fun, the soundtrack was a hit, and when it came time to play Deadlands, I decided to look for things to make another monster-western soundtrack.

The Devil Went Down to Georgia...hey, that's a really good song! So are these Appalachian ballads. And so is some band called Sixteen Horsepower. This page says they fit in the goth-country subgenre; does that mean there's more like it?

I had discovered the worlds of traditional and alt-country, which were much more to my taste than Toby Keith or Garth Brooks. Just as I discovered when Lupe Fiasco broke my preconceptions about rap, the good stuff doesn't always end up on the radio.

I'm not the only one who likes alt-country better than its pop equivalent. Columnist Chuck Klosterman argued that such banjo-filled ballads are made primarily for hipsters, and that pop-country is "real" because it reflects the actual experiences and preferences of rural Americans. Triggerman from Saving Country Music argues the opposite, that pop-country isn't real country, but a dumbed-down mess that reflects the truth of no one's life, while alt and traditional tap into the rich musical traditions of genuine Americana.

I'm not really one to speak on this matter as an aforementioned city girl; my mother fled the South as soon as she could, and it's never been a strong part of my heritage. Still, perhaps the fact that bands like O'Death and the Carolina Chocolate Drops can reach my jaded city heart counts for something?

All I know is that just as bringing in outside sources such as soundtracks can give a greater appreciation for the gaming experience, it can also work the other way around.

High Noon and What Came After

I find it interesting that so many movies feel the need to ‘respond’ to High Noon. Well, maybe interesting is the wrong word- more like baffling. I read about the attacks when it came out, calling the hero unmanly for showing fear and appearing to almost cry, and my reaction is a stunned cry of "But it’s High Noon! How can anyone hate High Noon?"

Apparently, some people did- or even if they liked it, felt the need to make a movie showing what should have happened. Rio Bravo and High Plains Drifter are both in some ways responses to the movie, though the responses are not quite the same. Rio Bravo is the response of a swaggering father saying "Son, you should be ashamed of yourself- you don’t need to rely on the townsfolk! And don’t show no fear, neither!" High Plains Drifteris the response of a troubled younger brother going "No man, what you oughtta do is go back there and kill every last one of those ungrateful sons of bitches!"

Funnily enough, I love all three of these movies. Rio Bravo is a delightful ensemble adventure, and the romance between John Wayne and Angie Dickinson is appealing (even if it is cribbed almost line for line from the director’s earlier movie, To Have and Have Not.) High Plains Drifter is a banquet of the bizarre, an epic, nihilistic horror movie masquerading as a western. I don’t even mind the rape scene- it certainly isn’t the most evil thing Clint Eastwood does over the course of the movie, which acknowledges that all those mysterious men with no names are scary for a damn good reason.

In the middle sits little old High Noon, an allegory for the Red Scare or Korea or urbanization or whatever us modern viewers like to attribute to it. It would be irritated by Rio Bravo’s response and horrified by High Plains Drifter, and would generally try to stay out of the conversation.

Why is it this movie provokes such strong reactions? There are many controversial movies and many ideas to be rebelled against, but why does the simple story of a man abandoned who sticks to his principles simply because it’s something he has to do (while being broken up inside that no one else seems to see it that way) upset people?

I don’t know. All I know is, while John Wayne looks on disgusted and Clint Eastwood paints the town red, tired and scared old Gary Cooper must stand by himself.

For High Noon, it’s a rather fitting position.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

This is less of a review than a brief analysis of the movie's "moral" (stop reading now if you don't want spoilers!) Upon re-watching this old favorite of mine, I was struck by the detail put into scenes about prospecting, particularly one that shows the details of panning for gold. Such details contribute nothing to the plot but are still a nice touch, letting us learn along with the characters about the realities of their new work.

Moreover, whether or not it was intended (and with such a prestige production it may well have been), it serves as a metaphor for how the gold itself reveals the true nature of the protagonists. Just as the water reveals which identical nuggets of rocks are valuable, so too does the entire ordeal of prospecting, as Tim Holt nearly buckles under his greed but manages to keep himself mostly morally pure- unlike Bogart, his foil.

Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs is not a monster; he is just a man who does a worse job resisting temptation than he imagined he would. Before prospecting, he was a loveable rogue, his main flaw seeming to be a lack of ambition, who will fight a man for what he is owed but take no more than his due. By the end he is a paranoid would-be-murderer and chronic betrayer, seeing the treachery in his own heart reflected in the eyes of his former friends.

The novel upon which the film was based is said to have been written as an anti-capitalist tract about how money destroys men's souls. As the film holds up today, the message appears to be a bit different. After all, Walter Huston and Tim Holt come out basically decent; only Bogart could be said to be "destroyed" by it, and even that couldn't have happened if he didn't have the hidden potential to be destroyed.

In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, gold serves not as a device to corrupt men, but a means of revealing their true nature. Those who are pure will stay pure. Those who never had the opportunity to be corrupt before will be presented with a chance- and may, like Bogart, discover a nastiness they didn't know they had.

Notes on the Female Western

As a female fan of westerns, there’s a certain feeling you get while watching DVD special features. Maybe it’s the bevy of film critics talking about how The Wild Bunch changed their life, or the directors who saw The Good, The Bad And The Ugly as children and so decided they wanted to make movies. The feeling can be articulated in a simple sentence: “Where are all the girls?"

And, you realize, the makers of such special features aren’t being sexist or exclusive in having only male speakers, you’re just not the target audience and never have been. Sure, it’s great that you loved their movie, but you’re not really expected to- and if you do, there’s still a suspicion that you’re not fully getting it. It can make you feel like Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon A Time In The West, all the male eyes on you as you ride into a town where your kind is rarely seen.

Thus, I find it interesting when western movies try to change things up in this regard and put a female character in the lead. Female supporting cast members have always been common enough, and some of them are great (I particularly love the women in High Noon and Montgomery Clift’s love interest in Red River), but giving them the bulk of the screen time is something different, and it seems to me that there are three main ways filmmakers go about it- gender can be irrelevant, it can be patronized, or they can try treat it “normally”.

In the first category is Johnny Guitar. One of the things I love about this movie is that no one gives any clichéd “I can shoot as well as any man!” speeches- Joan Crawford is tough and Mercedes McCambridge is scary, and these are facts no one questions. Their gender isn’t exactly ignored (Vienna spent her life in saloons, and is proud of the fact that she actually owns this one), but it isn’t treated as their sole character trait. Did women in the old west really have gunfights and face down lynch mobs? Maybe, maybe not, and it doesn’t matter. There’s no time to spend “proving your worth”; it’s already been established, and you’ve got a railroad to fight over.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Cat Ballou, a movie that pretty much defines the patronizing category. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun movie and Lee Marvin as Kid Shaleen is a joy to behold, but one would think that even a comedy about a “bandit queen” might occasionally take its main character seriously. Jane Fonda is leered at by every single character, the camera included, and she’s treated as flighty broad constantly bailed out by guys who have a thing for her. She robs a train (though the plan was Lee Marvin’s) and then gets upset when people hate her for it, and when it comes time to gun down the man responsible for her father’s death she doesn’t get any grand gunfight, but instead poses as a hooker to get into the man’s room and only ends up shooting him in a struggle for the gun (presumably so the studio could argue it was an accident and let their heroine escape punishment by the censors.) I’ll forgive the fact that she ends up with a character who pretty much tried to rape her earlier in the movie (it was the sixties, after all), but that’s really the least of it; the very idea of her being a competent western hero is treated as a joke in itself.

The aforementioned Once Upon A Time In The West is a good example of the third category, the “normal” one. This woman does something other than shoot a gun for a living (here’s a tip- if she’s a supporting character she’ll be a teacher, if she’s a main character she’ll be a whore.) No shoot-outs in the street for her, and there’s no reason for her to have them. What she does have is a general sense of decency and integrity, more so than the gunmen around her, and because of this she’s the only one to survive or have an actual life to live after the bad guys go down. The concept is almost subversive in a genre that relies so heavily on violence- to have a central character who has a semi-realistic position in the world and doesn’t get any fights, yet still manages to impress and come out on top.

I’m going to hazard a guess that women who like westerns enjoy them for the same reasons that men do- we love the sight of the Arizona desert, we like the idea (whatever our politics) of taming or surviving in a wild land where the law is what we make for ourselves, and we like to imagine that we’re Clint Eastwood. Sometimes filmmakers give us what we want and sometimes they don’t, but we’re rarely on the forefront of their minds. The “female” western can be good or bad, but whether the heroine is a fighter or a lover, it works best if there’s reason to watch her besides her gender. Girls can like westerns, but nobody likes being a novelty act.