Buffalo Bill and the Indians joins a select group of films whose popular failure nonetheless represented an aesthetic success: Patty Hearst (1987) and The King of Comedy (1983), come to mind as similar ventures. These films make difficult if inevitable choices to dramatize what’s antithetical to the audience’s narrative and emotional needs (notwithstanding their disdaining the audience’s deepest sensibilities for wanting to be entertained). A film, then, becomes difficult for the regular viewer when it fails to live up to “entertainment.” Altman’s offers the contrast starkly by showing entertainment used to make myth and, at the time in the 1880s, be popularly satisfying. Ultimately, the film concludes that entertainment is the essence of mythmaking.
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- “It ain’t much different from the real thing.”
In Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), Bill Cody (Paul Newman) thus describes the representations of history in his Wild West Show. His words reflect a culture’s (any culture’s) desire to have its myths and history too.
Believing that you have reached the juncture when historical reality and its representation are not much different suggests how a culture creates a successful image of itself, an image that over time and re-representation becomes absolutely irrefutable. Until, that is, doubts set in – breakdowns in the fidelity of the historical image.
American society has craved entertainment from the earliest days, and after the Civil War it seemed that Americans wanted to hear and see tales of courage. These tales told us how the savage Indians were subdued and the frontier was tamed. Most people lived outside the world that dramatized their world – in the 21st century, television, the Internet, movies, radio, have assimilated most Americans, and few live outside the mediated universe. Mythmaking itself has become the real thing – to French critic Jean Baudrillard’s thinking, the mediated universe has become more real than the real thing.
Altman’s film captures this representation-reality process with a dual lens. First, he observes the mythmakers in high stride, and then he critiques their actions through his own contemporary understanding of the entertainment ethos. He stylizes Bill Cody’s Wild West Show as the earliest vision of the mega-entertainment universe, a universe whence the imagination is subordinated to the mythmaking machinations of dozens of people. Altman accentuates this latter detail by focusing on the mythmakers in media res, thus making Buffalo Bill and the Indians an anti-story or a non-story about the story-makers, a premise that is inherently subversive of the myths processed by Cody and his financial backers and, hence, making it a less dramatically entertaining movie. His other films during this period, 1970–75 – M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, California Split, Nashville – undermined genre and audience expectations, but most of them managed to find an audience. Buffalo Bill has no genre, unless you call it a western, and in 1976, it generated very little public interest.
- “A rock ain’t a rock when it’s gravel.”
Even the story of Buffalo Bill as an entertainer who enjoyed great success (and, finally, bankruptcy) is treated in a revisionist fashion. Altman and Newman have made the former Indian fighter and buffalo hunter, a bright and shining figure of the American Great Plains, into one of the most pathetic figures in cinematic history. Although the film takes place in the late 1880s, when the Wild West Show was on the rise, there’s no redeeming value left in it. Nor are there any other people in the film with whom to identify, save Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), who is held out as a nearly impossibly noble alternative to Bill, treated in a strange way, as mythical as Bill has been.
As self-defeating as this film stacks up to be, from bad box office to a slack critical response, Buffalo Bill and the Indians itself represents the opposite of what Bill represented in his vision of the West: the myth is no longer a rock but gravel! Altman accomplishes what he wants to do by filming it in his inimitable style, with crisp editing and overlapping dialogue, coaxing performances such that our identification with the characters is repulsed – I call this Altmanesque use of actors a “theater of irritation,” whereby we might be repelled but we still stay fascinated with them (the best use of this comes in California Split with George Segal and Elliott Gould).
Buffalo Bill and the Indians joins a select group of films whose popular failure nonetheless represented an aesthetic success: Patty Hearst (1987) and The King of Comedy (1983), come to mind as similar ventures. These films make difficult if inevitable choices to dramatize what’s antithetical to the audience’s narrative and emotional needs (notwithstanding their disdaining the audience’s deepest sensibilities for wanting to be entertained). A film, then, becomes difficult for the regular viewer when it fails to live up to “entertainment.” Altman’s offers the contrast starkly by showing entertainment used to make myth and, at the time in the 1880s, be popularly satisfying. Ultimately, the film concludes that entertainment is the essence of mythmaking.
- “It’s a man like that that made the country what it is today.”
The Wild West Show makes the perfect subject for a close look at television. Indeed, Altman shows us the late-19th-century version of television entertainment. He knew this world intimately, having directed over 100 episodes for a decade starting in 1957. Some of his westerns include Bonanza (8 episodes), Sugarfoot (2), Maverick (1), Lawman (1), Bronco (1), U.S. Marshal (15), as well as non-westerns like The Roaring Twenties (9), Bus Stop (8), Combat (10), and my personal favorite, Whirlybirds (20). He didn’t develop his skills during the so-called Golden Age in the manner of Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, and Arthur Penn. Altman still managed to develop his narrative style, including using overlapping dialogue, touching controversial issues, and working with a tight budget. His feelings about the television megahit M*A*S*H are articulated in the DVD commentary:
I didn’t like the series because that series to me was the opposite of my main reason for making this film – and this was to talk about a foreign war, an Asian war, that was going on at the time. And to perpetuate that every Sunday night for 12 years – and no matter what platitudes they say about their little messages and everything – the basic image and message is that the brown people with the narrow eyes are the enemy.1
He didn’t seem thrilled, either, at how the show obliterated collective memory of the film. I’m not sure how he would defend the film against accusations of misogyny, as some have written about on the film’s 50th anniversary, although his subsequent films give women stronger roles and narratives, as we see in Nashville (1975) and 3 Women (1977).
All the elements of the television ethos are dramatized Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Foremost, we see the vacuousness of the leading man in the show. Bill’s greatest flaw is that he’s playing himself. Although we don’t see even a remnant of his past actions – only ludicrously false versions of it – in the Wild West Show, he tries to live up to his former greatness. Except that he cheats at it. We discover his accuracy with a pistol is the result of it being a scattershot. His pursuit of Sitting Bull never comes close to its quarry. Worse, the man who made his career, Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster), arrives at the show and unnerves Bill because of a phantom threat that the “truth” about Bill will emerge. However, Bill’s problem is more that he can’t identify what really haunts him, save for a sequence when he’s confronted in a dream by Sitting Bull.
Is Bill, like Custer, paying for the sins of American civilization? From Altman’s perspective, there’s little difference between the sins (destroying Native American culture) and the representation of them in our entertainment. Indeed, the two become the same thing! Television (entertainment) as human sacrifice.
- “History is nothing more than disrespect for the dead.”
How can William Cody be contained in the role of Buffalo Bill? It didn’t start this way. He wanted to be “the man” and perpetuate his success into greater successes. Mediated successes. In Buffalo Bill and the Indians, we are seeing the show in 1885 when Sitting Bull joins it. It is in its infancy, and the subsequent success lasts until the Panic of 1893. Altman includes a visit by Grover Cleveland (Pat McCormick) and his recent bride (Shelley Duvall). It’s an occasion Sitting Bull uses to petition the president to come to an accommodation with the Indian Nations. We also get a taste of the show’s European tour. In England, Bill performs before two million patrons, including Queen Victoria, with over 300 performances. The film only shows a clueless president and a doddering queen. Many film critics attacked Altman as pretentious, exasperating, and boring. Especially egregious for many was the portrayal of Bill and “using Newman as neither villainous, heroic nor romantic but only as a fairly uninteresting lout.”2 Another critic writes: “In the last analysis it’s an emotionally empty, alienating movie, an ill-advised attempt to project a cynical, apprehensive view of the present onto the past.”3
I accept their opinions, based on their ignoring the reason that the film and Buffalo Bill must be like this. I expect Altman was caught up in his critique of the Wild West show and its arrogant representations of the conquest of the Indians – based on his opinion of the television version of M*A*S*H. Inevitably, there’s the feeling that “Altman appears to know a lot more about show business than about the American Indian, and what he knows about the former mainly consists of behavioral observation; by scaling this observation down exclusively to what illustrates his thesis – the hollow fakery of Buffalo Bill and his followers.”4
And what about the history lesson of the film’s subtitle? Does it refer to the lesson Bull gets when he approaches President Cleveland: “Mr, Halsey, I remind you that in government, nothing is simple”? And we know either before or at the end of the film that Bull was shot in the head by Indian police in 1890. Or is history the white man’s illusion that by controlling the narrative one controls the subjects of the narrative? Sitting Bull’s every action in the camp undermines the plans of Bill and other producers of the Wild West Show.
- Buffalo Bill’s Defunct
Defunct: no longer living, no longer in force; inactive.
The Western myth no longer lives. We see it on television.
Perhaps all content flowing through television is no longer in force. Dead on arrival. Includes news content, advertising, public broadcasting, reality shows, etc.
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Back to William Cody, e. e. cummings’s defunct boy.
His Wild West Show insists that he’s relevant. Bill insists on sustaining his heroics across time (1880s and 1890s) and space (America and Europe). Altman’s “Show” depicts all the elements that make this particular rendition of American life a complete fraud.
It starts with the denial that the West is dead and the frontier spirit a lie. How? Altman depicts Bill in full knowledge of this lie and his fear that the public might find it out. Nearly all the performers and administrative staff feel uncomfortable in their jobs. It’s reminiscent of the Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) scenario, keeping up the appearance that their boss is still alive. Ned Buntline emerges slightly more repellent for creating “Buffalo Bill” and completely unforgivable for being fully conscious of the stories he propounded regarding Bill. Sitting Bull inevitably becomes the most daunting and noble figure because he refuses to participate in the lie.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
