Let’s just you and me play, the gambler says.
A showdown is about to occur. It is the cliché of the Wild West. It has been repeated in hundreds of films shown in thousands of theaters and millions of TV sets again and again. The tension grows but the Sundance Kid’s expression doesn’t change. His eye movements, his pauses, are in a kind of relaxed harmony between himself and his surroundings even though we see that he is in a growingly dangerous situation, which soon explodes into violence.
What Phædrus wanted to do now was use just that one scene as an opening illustration. To it he would add just one explanation which no one ever notices, but which he was sure was true. What you have just seen, he would explain, is a rendition of the cultural style of an American Indian.
Then would be seen, identified for what they were, the famous old traits of the American Indian: silence, a modesty of manner, and a dangerous willingness to sudden, enormous violence.
It would be a dramatic way of making the point, he thought. Before you are alerted to it you don’t see it, but once you become aware, it’s obvious. The source of values that Robert Redford tapped and that the American public overwhelmingly responded to is the cultural value pattern of the American Indian. Even the color of Redford’s face in the sepia monochrome was changed to that of an Indian.
Certainly it wasn’t the intention of the film to personify an Indian. It came naturally as a way of showing the Wild West. But the point of Phædrus' thesis was that the reason it came naturally and that audiences responded to it naturally was that the film reached into a root source of American feelings for what is good. It is this source of what is good, this historic cultural system of American values, which is Indian.
If you take a list of all the things European observers have stated to be the characteristics of white Americans, you’ll find that there is a correlation with the characteristics white American observers have customarily assigned to the Indians. And if, furthermore, you take another list of all the characteristics that Americans use to describe Europeans you’ll get a pretty good correlation with Indian opinions of white Americans.
To prove this point Phædrus intended to reverse the situation: instead of showing how a cowboy resembles an Indian, he would show how an Indian resembles a cowboy. For this he’d found a description by the anthropologist, E. A. Hoebel, of a Cheyenne Indian male:
Reserved and dignified… [the Cheyenne male]… moves with a quiet sense of self-assurance. He speaks fluently, but never carelessly. He is careful of the sensibilities of others and is kindly and generous. He is slow to anger and strives to suppress his feelings, if aggravated. Vigorous on the hunt, in war he prizes the active life. Towards enemies he feels no merciful compunctions, and the more aggressive he is the better. He is well versed in ritual knowledge. He is neither flighty nor dour. Usually quiet, he has a lightly displayed sense of humor. He is sexually repressed and masochistic but that masochism is expressed in culturally approved rites. He does not show much creative imagination in artistic expression but he has a firm grip on reality. He deals with the problems of life in set ways while at the same time showing a notable capacity to readjust to new circumstances. His thinking is rationalistic to a high degree and yet colored with mysticism. His ego is strong and not easily threatened. His superego, as manifest in the strong social conscience and mastery of his basic impulses, is powerful and dominating. He is mature, serene and composed, secure in his social position, capable of warm social relations. He has powerful anxieties but these are channelized into institutionalized modes of collective expression with satisfactory results. He exhibits few neurotic tendencies.
Now if that isn’t a description of William S. Boyd playing Hopalong Cassidy in twenty-three or fifty or however many films, there never was one. With the single exception of the Indian mysticism the characterization is perfect.
Whether the American cowboy ever really was like William S. Boyd is not really relevant. What is relevant is that in the 1930s, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, Americans shoveled out millions of dollars to look at his movies. They didn’t have to. Nobody forced them to. But they went anyway, just as they later went to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
They did so because those movies were a confirmation of the values they believed in. Those movies were rituals, almost religious rituals, for transmitting the cultural values of America to the young and reconfirming them in the old. It wasn’t a deliberate, conscious process; people were just doing what they liked. It is only when one analyzes what they liked that one sees the assimilation of Indian values.
Others of the thousands of slips in Phædrus' trays continued this analysis: many Europeans think of white Americans as a sloppy, untidy people, but they’re not nearly as untidy as the Indians on the reservations. Europeans often think of white Americans as being too direct and plain-spoken, bad-mannered and sort of insolent the way they do things, but Indians are even more that way. In the Second World War Europeans noted that American troops drank too much, and when they got drunk they made a lot of trouble. The comparison with Indians is obvious. But on the other hand, European military commanders rated the stability of American troops under fire as high, and that is also an Indian characteristic.
That steady When you say that, smile! look the cowboy movies love to portray (and Europeans tend to abhor) is pure Indian, except that when the Indian looks that way it doesn’t necessarily mean he is threatening. What causes that steady look comes from something much deeper.
Indians don’t talk to fill time. When they don’t have anything to say, they don’t say it. When they don’t say it, they leave the impression of being a little ominous. In the presence of this Indian silence, whites sometimes get nervous and feel forced as a matter of politeness or kindness to fill the vacuum with a kind of small-talk which often says one thing and means another. But these well-mannered circumlocutions of aristocratic European speech are forked-tongue talk to the Indian and are infuriating. They violate his morality. He wants you to either speak from the heart or keep quiet. This has been a source of Indian-white conflict for centuries and, although the modern white American personality is a compromise of that conflict, the conflict still exists.
To this day Americans are mistakenly characterized by Europeans as like children, naive, immature and tending toward violence because they don’t know how to control themselves. That mistake is also made about Indians. To this day white Americans are also mistakenly characterized by Indians as a bunch of snobs who think you are so stupid you can never see how phony they are. That mistake is also made about Europeans.
This anti-snobbery of all Americans, particularly Western Americans, is derived from this Indian attitude. The Cheyenne name for white man is wihio, meaning spider. Arapaho use niatha to mean the same thing. To the Indian, whites seemed like spiders when they talked. They sat there and smiled and said things they didn’t mean, and all the time their mind was spinning a web around the Indian. They got so lost in their own web-spinning thoughts they didn’t even see that the Indian was watching them too and could see what they were doing.
The American politics of isolationism, in its refusal to become entangled in the meshes of European polities comes from this root, Phædrus thought. Most of American isolationism has come from regions that are closest to the American Indian.