On Political Filmmaking and Alex Cox’s Walker (1987)

Alex Cox’s Walker (1987) is an instructive example of how to make a film about modern political issues without becoming overly burdened by the present moment. In telling the story of William Walker, a mid-19th century Tennessee-born filibuster who successfully invaded Nicaragua in the 1850s and established himself as president, Cox completely eschews traditional norms around historical filmmaking.

* * *

How does one approach making a film about our current political moment? A complex question that is currently in the ether since two high-profile directors have taken stabs this year at capturing our present madness in Ari Aster’s Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. While I found the former to be more successful than the latter, I am more interested in the discourse these films have generated. Many filmmakers in the last fifteen years have skirted the difficulty of depicting our moment in time altogether by making films set in the past, sidestepping the dramatic and visual complications introduced by smartphones as well as the rapidly shifting political insanity in which we all find ourselves entangled. Yet I sense something of a zeitgeist shift, most notably indicated by PTA’s decision to make a modern political epic after spending the last twenty-three years exclusively making period pieces. Perhaps we are embarking on a new era of politically conscious films set in the present day. This begs a question: What strategies should filmmakers consider when trying to politically engage with our increasingly confusing reality?

In his famous 1970 manifesto “What Is to Be Done?,” Marxist director Jean-Luc Godard argued for filmmakers to “make films politically” rather than simply “make political films.” Godard was frustrated by films that simply “describe[d] the wretchedness of the world,” something many contemporary films are guilty of, both narrative and documentary. What he proposed were films made by actively political agents that used “images and sounds as teeth and lips to bite with.”1 Filmmakers should have a point of view, Godard argued, and they should not be afraid to ruffle the feathers of the bourgeois intelligentsia that dominates Hollywood as well as mainstream independent filmmaking.

Alex Cox’s Walker (1987) is an instructive example of how to make a film about modern political issues without becoming overly burdened by the present moment. In telling the story of William Walker, a mid-19th century Tennessee-born filibuster who successfully invaded Nicaragua in the 1850s and established himself as president, Cox completely eschews traditional norms around historical filmmaking. He tells a period piece that eventually collapses distinctions between the past and the present by the unexplained introduction of cars, Coca-Cola, and helicopters, making it clear that his real interest is the present state of Nicaragua, at the time embroiled in a war between the socialist Sandinista government and the US-backed right-wing rebel group the Contras. Cox read about William Walker while visiting Granada and decided to make a film about him on location in Nicaragua with support from the Sandinistas. Coming off the underground success of Repo Man (1984) and the mainstream critical success of Sid and Nancy (1986), Cox convinced notable leftist Ed Harris to take the lead role and managed to coax a $6 million budget out of Universal Pictures in what is surely one of the most unabashedly left-wing films to ever be greenlit by a major US studio. After the film proved to be a disastrous flop (grossing $250,000), Cox was effectively exiled from Hollywood and resigned himself to making microbudget films in Mexico.

We should be thankful Cox put his career on the line for this project because the story of William Walker, while little known, is ripe with all the sweeping contradictions of American history. Walker was an ardent believer in the Monroe Doctrine, neatly summarized early in the film when he proclaims, “It is the God given right of the American people to dominate the Western Hemisphere.” In his new book America, América: A New History of the New World, historian Greg Grandin details how Spanish Americans in Central and South America were initially ecstatic at Monroe’s famous speech since they interpreted themselves as belonging to the common project that was America.2 Happy to see the Europeans booted from the Western Hemisphere, they were assured that the newly formed United States had Latin America’s best interests in mind. By the time of Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua in 1855, it had become clear that the USA had claimed the term “America” for itself, and its intention was to plunder Central and South America for all they were worth under the banner of Manifest Destiny. As one Chilean politician put it during the siege of Nicaragua, “Walker is the invasion. Walker is the Conquest. Walker is the United States.”3

“President of Nicaragua” William Walker. Public domain portrait by Matthew Brady, 1850, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Walker, though, truly believed that he was liberating the Nicaraguan people, at least initially. Contrary to the crass material interests of tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, who commissioned Walker’s expedition in order to seize the civil war-embroiled country and build a lucrative canal through it (Peter Boyle plays Vanderbilt in the film, describing Nicaragua as “a fucked-up little country somewhere to the south of here”), Ed Harris’s Walker speaks in hushed tones about the moral imperative of “spreading democracy” to the backward people of Central America. He views himself as a man of principle, openly opposed to slavery and disgusted by the profit motives of the Vanderbilts of the world. After initially scoffing at Vanderbilt’s proposal to invade Nicaragua, Walker’s deaf wife (Marlee Matlin) passes, and given that she was the grounding moral force in his life, he quickly begins perverting his own ethics to justify the cause of “liberating” Nicaragua.

Cox has Walker narrate his own story in the third person, and to say he is unreliable is to put it mildly. As Walker and his band of ne’er-do-wells arrive in Nicaragua, he narrates that they were “welcomed as liberators” as we witness expressions of pure horror on the faces of the locals as a ragtag group of colonizers marches through their streets. Cox’s tone is darkly comic, as evidenced by the scene in which Walker instructs his men to comport themselves with dignity in order to earn the locals’ trust, immediately after which the men begin madly robbing everyone in sight, assaulting local women, and engaging in bestiality with a pen of sheep. This is not a subtle film: Cox paints in broad strokes to demonstrate the wide chasm between how Walker understands his mission and the reality on the ground.

As they advance toward Granada, the colonizers are attacked by a group of rebels in one of several set-pieces that evokes The Wild Bunch by way of Airplane! Walker confidently struts through a village as his men are shot dead all around him, blood gushing from squibs that barely conceal their prosthetic nature. As the bullets start flying, the soundtrack abruptly pivots from upbeat Latin music to an ethereal score featuring xylophones and ominous piano. The soundtrack in Walker, composed by the Clash frontman Joe Strummer, is a highlight, centrally featuring a recurring, haunting piano motif that plays in one’s head days after watching the film. Cox provides some diegetic music too: As his men are brutally slain by the rebels, Walker calmly walks into a house and begins playing “Silver Threads Among the Gods” on a piano (the first of many anachronisms, since the song wasn’t written until the late 19th century). Cox films this scene in an extended handheld take, panning from Walker’s preposterous singing to one of his men clasping his face after he is shot in the eye, blood pouring through his fingers. The sound design is pure cacophony, a mix of curdled screams, bad piano and singing, gunshots, and hordes of men inaudibly yelling orders at one another. It’s funny and horrifying in equal parts, with gags and sudden death existing in an uncomfortable union. While the proceedings may seem random, Cox undoubtedly blocked the sequence with utmost precision. Any filmmaker can throw a bunch of nonsense into a scene and see what sticks, but Cox is the rare breed of anarchic director whose chaos never feels like weirdness for its own sake.

The colonizers eventually make it to Granada, and while Walker initially lets the reigning president stay in charge (as the president’s wife seduces him to stay in his good graces), he eventually has the president executed on discovering a plot to rally other Central American countries to oust the colonizers from Nicaragua. Walker installs himself as president, at which point the narrative begins to fully divorce itself from reality. We see men reading copies of Newsweek and People magazines with Walker’s face on the cover, cars driving alongside horse carriages, and characters drinking Coca-Cola while smoking Marlboros. The accruing anachronisms parallel Walker’s escalating madness, beginning with his disastrous decision to revoke Vanderbilt’s trade license after he learns the tycoon is nickel-and-diming his settlement. Having functionally turned Nicaragua into a pariah state, he decides to reintroduce slavery in order to curry favor from southern US states, completely forsaking his earlier pledge of abolitionism. When several of his subordinates question his decision-making, Walker makes a proclamation that will sound familiar to contemporary viewers: “Gentlemen, it was granted to me in our recent constitution that I have the authority and the autonomy to do whatever I want.” When an underling asks if he can inquire as to why Walker has “betrayed every principle you’ve had, all the men who’ve supported you,” he simply replies, “No.” While continuing to refer to himself as a “social democrat,” Walker’s dictatorial nature has been laid bare; any pretense to a moral compass went out the window once the opportunity to amass total power presented itself.

The film climaxes with several neighboring countries, armed with machine guns and modern artillery, invading Nicaragua, leading to a decree from Walker for his men to burn Granada to the ground. The apocalyptic nighttime inferno that Cox stages with characteristic gusto culminates in a speech by Walker in a church in the center of town. After gleefully eating a man’s kidney in a bizarre bit of cannibalism, our protagonist finally unmasks the true character of his mission to the locals:

You all might think that there will be a day when America will leave Nicaragua alone. But I am here to tell you flat-out, that that day will never happen, because it is our destiny to be here. It is our destiny to control you people. So no matter how much you fight, no matter what you think, we’ll be back, time and time again.

Walker and his men leave the church while singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and are greeted by a helicopter carrying modern American soldiers whose mission is to return “all American citizens to their homeland,” gunning down those who fail to present a proper passport. Walker stays behind and is soon arrested, taken to Honduras, and executed, his self-righteous narration coming to an abrupt, unceremonious end.

4/4/1985 President Reagan in Robert McFarlane’s office with Adolfo Calero, Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance (Contra) leader (left) and Oliver North (center). Public domain photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Over the end credits, Cox depicts a television flipping between videos concerning contemporary Nicaragua, including testimonials from Ronald Reagan, US military officers, and images of naked corpses, including innocent women and children who had their lives snuffed out by American-backed forces that could not allow the existence of a successful socialist state in Latin America. According to Grandin, the war crimes committed by the Contras included “cutting the throats of their captives with large Kabar knives, burning down schools and health clinics, and blowing up rural hydroelectric plants.” In 1986, while Walker was in production, the International Court of Justice found the US guilty of waging an illegal war in Nicaragua and ordered the government to pay $17 billion in reparations. The Reagan administration responded by withdrawing from the ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction, and when Nicaragua went to the UN for help, the US used its Security Council veto to quash their efforts.4 The methods with which the US wielded international power had shifted in the intervening 130 years since Walker’s invasion, but the fact of Nicaragua’s dependence on the whims of their hemispheric overlords remained the same.

For all the Zucker Brothers-esque goofiness with which Cox imbues much of the film, the coda is a sobering reminder of the real and present consequences of America’s imperial conquests. Walker’s story is distant and largely unknown by Americans, but Cox demonstrates how little has changed in the interim, how the Monroe Doctrine continues to dominate American foreign policy for nakedly capitalistic means under the guise of “spreading democracy” (this term and Walker’s story more generally carry even greater resonance post-Iraq War, not to mention the current proposal to have Donald Trump and Tony Blair oversee the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip after it was destroyed by Western bombs).

Cox’s decision to obliterate the distance between past and present serves two important purposes: It prevents the film from becoming a stodgy period drama, and it bypasses the difficulty of capturing “now-ness” in a manner that could make the film dated. By playing fast and loose with history, Cox achieves what Werner Herzog has dubbed “the ecstatic truth,” a type of truth greater than can be captured via the fraudulent (in Herzog’s estimation) conventions of cinema vérité. Just as Herzog embedded himself in the Peruvian jungle to seek the ecstatic truth in Fitzarraldo (1982), Cox made Granada his home for an extended period of time, using Universal’s money to hire a crew of locals (a much-needed boon to the struggling economy, crippled by US sanctions), received input on the script from Sandinista officials (who also helped finance the film), and stayed behind to edit the film in Nicaragua, not wanting to be a “rich gringo” who came and left willy-nilly. Ed Harris put a significant portion of his salary into the film, viewing the project as a means to help end the bloodshed of the Contra War. These efforts speak to another tenet of Godard’s, who called on filmmakers to “dare to know where one is, and where one has come from, to know one’s place in the process of production in order then to change it.” To do this, one has to be an active agent in the world, using the reality of oppression to fuel one’s art and remain a participant in history after the film is completed.

Walker arrived in theaters to crickets. In his zero-star review of the film, Roger Ebert dubbed it a “pointless and increasingly obnoxious exercise in satire.” He was particularly livid at the anachronisms, which he posited Cox included to “show that it’s all a joke.”5 Given Ebert’s preference for sentimentalism and traditional narrative structure, it’s no surprise that he didn’t take to Walker. But for him to have sat through the end credits and missed the moral seriousness with which Cox treats his subject matter suggests a critic who is uninterested in engaging with art that is outside his comfort zone. Ebert was not alone in his distaste for the film; to this day it holds a paltry 47% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not every contemporary reviewer missed the mark: the New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, “Without being solemn, it’s deadly serious. . . . Walker is something very rare in American movies these days. It has some nerve.”6 This was true in 1987, and it certainly applies today.

Can movies actually change the world? The half-century since Godard wrote his manifesto has not been kind to this notion, and it’s unlikely that the little-seen Walker did much to change the course of Nicaraguan history. That Walker was made at all is a small miracle, though the likelihood of a studio taking a comparable gamble in our current era of risk-averse, IP-centered slop is exceedingly slim. And yet I can’t help but feel that something has to give, that a new type of filmmaking can and will emerge from the ashes of our creatively putrid culture. The escalating global crises we face call for bold and uncompromising artists to help give shape and texture to the madness all around us. While changing the world through art may seem a laughable idea in an era when art as a gravitational center to the culture has been wildly devalued and when AI threatens to replace the artist altogether, I will always believe that artists will be needed to help build whatever world comes next. Maybe Tik-Tok influencers or video game developers will subsume that role, but I can’t quit cinema. It’s a young medium that still has vast, uncharted territory for young filmmakers to explore. When those aspiring directors study cinema’s history for guidance on how to live and create political art, Walker is a good place to start.

* * *

All images are screenshots from the film. Walker is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.