“How to Man: An Appeal for the Quiet Western”

by Lee Keeler

Winter in Ames, Iowa can be taxing. If not for Iowa State University, the town wouldn’t be much more than an Earl May and a Burger King. What few havens that present themselves must be embraced in full. As a young man, it was the bars. When I came back in my forties, it was The Salvation Army.

I had spent the previous ten years doing comedy out in LA. I did okay, with a show at the Improv Hollywood for seven years and some videos I hosted for Buzzfeed. By the time I left town, it had all bottomed out: my car died, the main publisher I wrote for shut down, I lost my Improv show and my girlfriend moved back to China. My parents let me move into their basement with a cat who puked twice a day named Rags. I got a job subbing at an ESL school full of track lighting down the road. That year the winter lasted six months; the last snowfall was in May.

I started getting into westerns as a means of escape. They reminded me of my scout masters from my days in Troop 221; these were guys with names like Denny and Chuck who snorted when they gave commands and had served in Vietnam. I was now their age, the same age as when they counselled me, and I could feel myself cutting all ties with the college dorm version of myself. No more movie posters. No more kooky tee shirts. In this sense, maybe the westerns weren’t an escape so much as me creeping towards how to man.

I didn’t quite know how to man. Or to man at least in the way that men could man back home. I wasn’t macho, I didn’t want a truck, I couldn’t keep a woman. I remember going to a bar alone and just watching globs of people scream at each other over Garth Brooks. I tried to blend in and the beer didn’t help.

One Tuesday, my fortunes turned around in the media section of the Salvation Army on the way home from work. I held a VHS tape aloft, above the slush and slort on my boots, above the dry cough in aisle ten, above my depression. That was the day that I found The Grey Fox.

In the realm of westerns, I was raised, from boyhood to undergrad, in the ways of John Wayne.

We were fed a cowboy archetype who walked tall and guffawed at women-folk and let his fists do the talking.

This was indoctrination at every level. Grampa Max kept Hondo and other Louis L’amour books on top of the board games. Wayne was one of five faces in the background of every neon clock, faux painting or gift card at Spencer’s Gifts. By college, my professors were fawning over the composition of John Ford, a man who built a career around the look and perception of John Wayne. Worst of all, The Duke was born in Iowa. It was just endemic.

The Grey Fox broke this pattern for me, an antidote to “dumb leather” westerns. We meet Bill Miner, a former stage coach robber who gets out of prison as an old man and learns how to rob trains. It’s a quiet, muted look at how an aging outlaw can make his way in a world that has moved on without him. The old goat has to start over and finds a way to make it happen without yelling or guns blazing. Throughout the film, when Miner faces a problem, he keeps his mouth shut and his head down, working shit jobs and biding his time. The guy drinks alone by choice. Director Phillip Borsos, a protege of Francis Ford Coppola, rolls us through beatific landscapes of earth and pine to weave a crime story that feels as contemplative as it is mindful. Shot in 1981, it predates the liver-spot wisdom of Unforgiven and the meadow-tations of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford“.

The day after I saw The Grey Fox, I sang in the hallway at work. I got an extra chicken nugget in my bag at lunch. And Rags the cat only puked one time.

There was a little beam of light burning through the wall of winter and I’d be damned if I was going to let it go. It was a lesson that someone can go home again with dignity and, God forbid, some stoic elegance that doesn’t make him any less of a man.

The key ingredient to that film is Richard Farnsworth, who plays the namesake character. Up to that point, Farns had spent four decades as a stuntman or in background parts as a generic rustler. When his moment as a lead finally arrived, he didn’t ham it up or go hard. In this regard, Farnsworth, as The Grey Fox and a man, is nearly the inverse of John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn. He doesn’t meet the apex of his life with belly and bluster, but with a grace and tenacity that makes survival a long game for those who take their whiskey slow.

It didn’t fix everything, but that little movie still pops into the VCR every now and again. I got into therapy and learned to take stock in the peace of drinking alone at a bar. If a man in your life needs a smart leather western, or might be surviving a cold snap in Ames, The Grey Fox is well worth hunting down.

CONTRIBUTOR’S STATEMENT:

We find ourselves in a moment in which we often surrender entire portions of our lives to digital media. As a society, the long-term effect of binging social media videos, streaming shows and video games has yet to be revealed. In this sense, a movie is an anchor in a torrent of addictive content; we can spend an allotted amount of time in a story that grants us escape from, and a sensible return to, our lives. We also have the chance to get out of our homes and go to a theater, where we can share a sense of safe communion in the dark with friends and strangers.