Posted on February 26th 2004
Movie Review: 'Ride with the Devil'
By Alex Linder
Sometime back around 1928, a big cat curled its lip and snarled for the last time in the Show-Me State, as a farmer somewhere down in the Ozarks drew a bead and put it out of his misery. The last Missouri man was extinguished something of the same way, sixty years earlier. But there was a time....Set in Missouri, "Ride with the Devil" is one of the five best movies I've ever seen, and far and away the best treatment of the "Civil War." I'm prejudiced because my people have lived in Missouri since the early decades of the 1800s, so I liked seeing on film the rolling hills and the woodsy countryside that make Missouri a green and pleasant place, and it's inherently interesting to see on screen political struggles my family was bound in a number of ways. But that aside, this picture by Taiwanese Ang Lee does an impressive job evoking the men and mentalities that culminated in the war between states - or within a state, in Missouri's case. In sticking to the small scale, "Ride with the Devil" captures the big picture far better than movies essaying the Grand Sweep, which typically collapse in self-conscious Importance.
"Ride with the Devil" shows you what happens when men who live next door to one another disagree over questions that one of them, at least, can't compromise, thereby forcing the other to kill or conform. Moreover, it nails the specific mindsets at odds in the Anti-American Crusade, and in dramatizing their conflict raises an even deeper question, and one I'd never really considered before, having more or less swallowed without chewing the idea found in Goldwater's Conscience of Conservative that our goal is maximum liberty consistent with civilized order. But...is liberty consistent in any way with civilized order? Can civilized men be free? Or is freedom inherently and essentially feral, and civilization a fettered subordination different in degree but not in kind from slavery? This movie comes very close to showing that feral men are the only free men. When I reflect on today's professional defenders of "freedom," the writers at LewRockwell.com, for example, I feel the matter all but cinched. For Lew Rockwell is most assuredly no Celtic-American Eagle riding back into Freeport and certain death because, goddamn it, he's from there, and no man nor hundred men are going to chase him out of his home. Lew's freedom is the freedom of the baby to crawl from one side of its playpen to the other. More on this in a moment. But first this ejaculation: what a thing is art! How superior it is to jewish "psychology" in picking at man-ticking. How clearer a pane it puts before our wondering eyes than some cheap reduction to sex or money drives. Art shows you things in the world and in yourself you didn't realize were there, or only dimly sensed before it put them in breathtaking relief. This film is good art, and as you know, good art is always, and particularly these days, in short supply.
Missouri is a Southern state with thick streaks of North, such as the swath through the midsection along the Missouri river where Germans came to settle in the mid-19th century. Missouri was home to many Germans who came over after the failed socialist revolutions of 1848, as Jimmy Cantrell and others have written, and these made for natural union men - believers in Equality as a religious ideal, and believers in the state's right to force egalitarian ideology on free men. Even if those free men were there first and had given birth to the nation in the first place. These German socialists, with their Protestant state-worship and soldierly cultural traditions, made natural military fodder for the descendants of Puritans controlling the East and Upper Midwest, and the nation as a whole, politically. These WASPs, led by the Lincoln my ancestor Usher Linder and Stephen Douglas battled against, used the new Germans in the Midwest and the new Irish in the Northeast to crush the real American spirit embodied in the Celtic traditions and people of the South. The victors called it a new birth of American freedom, but in fact it was and remains the defining American tragedy, turning us from a motley collection of free and weird states into Levy's bargain-basement one-size-fitz-all Leviathan Leisure Suit. As Chruchill pointed out, the empires of the future will be empires of the mind, and so the mentality that destroyed freedom in the South yesterday is today bent on the physical genocide of the White race, and not just in the South and the North, but worldwide, wherever Whites have settled. Itz genocidal campaign is carried out not via cavalry waves but airwaves.
Against the Northern moralizers array the Southerners, true Americans, and Celtic in culture - fighting, fiddle-playing feral farmers. Among these numbers the film's protagonist, Jake Roedel, with the ironic twist that he is ethnically German. "Dutchy" as they call him was born in Germany, but raised in Missouri, and as Southern as anyone. Against the wishes of his father, who wants him to wait out the war in the union-controlled safety in St. Louis, he sticks with his Southern kin, and joins up with ragtag bands of so-called Bushwackers who do battle with feds and "Jayhawkers" - abolitionist Kansans who put torch and bullet to Southern sympathizers wherever they find them. In other words, the war in Missouri was nasty and internecine and no-holds-barred, with ambushes and burn-outs the order of the day.
There are two scenes that capture the heart of the struggle. One I've mentioned, and will return to. The other is a dinner at which Jake and his "brother" John Bull sit down with a rich Southern Missourian who's helping them hide out over the winter. He's a businessman who has traveled, and is about to move his family to Texas for the duration. He sees what's going to happen, and his exchange with Jake and John bears the gravitas of the issue:
Mr. Evans: Half Missouri's going to Texas. State's thick with invaders. We cannot drive them away.
John Bull: We have a different thought. I still want to fight. Reckon I'll always want to fight them.
Mr. Evans: You ever been to Lawrence, Kansas, young man?
John Bull: No, I reckon not, Mr. Evans. Don't believe I'd be too welcome in Lawrence.
Mr. Evans: Before this war began, my business took me there often. And as I saw these Northerners begin to build that town, I witnessed the seeds of our destruction being sown. The founding of that town was truly the beginning of the Yankee invasion. I'm not speaking of numbers, or even abolitionist troublemakers. It was the schoolhouse. Before they built their churches, they built that schoolhouse. And they lettered every tailor's son and farmer's daughter in the county.
John Bull: Spelling won't help you hold a plow any firmer. Or a gun either.
Mr. Evans: No, it won't, Mr. Chiles, but my point is merely that they rounded every pup-pup into that schoolhouse because they fancied that everyone should think and talk the same freethinking way they do, with no regard to station, custom, or propriety. And that is why they will win. Because they believe everyone should live and think just like them. And we shall lose. Because we don't care one way or another how they live, we just worry about ourselves.
John Bull: Are you saying, sir, that we fight for nothing?
Mr. Evans: Far from it, Mr. Chiles. You fight for everything that we ever had. It's just that we don't have it anymore.
Jake Roedel: (with feeling) When you get back from Texas, it'll be here waiting for you. Jack and me will see to it.
Mr. Evans: Well...yes...thank you, son. (changes subject)
As you can see, the boys are stouthearted, but naive. No matter how heroic, and how "morally right" they are, their side will lose. Because might makes right, and the numbers and aggressive mentality are on the side of the North, no matter what the Constitution says or what the people want.
Over time and through battles and losses and injuries, Roedel and the ex-slave who's one of their band of four, along with his ex-master and friend Clyde who brought him out, become friends of a sort, and begin to see that their participation is not going to change anything substantial. Although there's never any indication they see their cause as wrong, the fact is they're drawn into the fight more for personal than political reasons, and so they begin to see at a certain point that their bushwacking is simply killing and burning out innocent people. The issue is decided, it's time to move on.
Not all the Bushwackers feel this way. Itz do or die to some. One of these is Pitt Mackeson, who's been a thorn in Roedel's side the whole movie, distrusting his being "Dutch," and his friendship with the nigger. Finally he shoots him in the leg in the middle of a firefight with the Union boys after the Lawrence raid. Mackeson is either a sadist or simply a feral human being. He certainly believes in the cause, but it's pretty clear, killing people for the sheer sport of it, and for the plunder, runs a close second. He's about as close to feral as a human gets. He nearly shoots Roedel eating breakfast in Lawrence when Roedel prevents him from murdering the old couple running the restaurant. The contrast between the old man's blubbering thanks -- sharply cut off by irritated civilized Southerner Roedel -- and the fearless but ferally dangerous Mackeson is sharp and effective. The scene at the very end, though, is unforgettable.
Convalescing at a sympathizer's home with the snaggletoothsome Jewel, who he marries after his brother, who married her first and sired a pup on her, is killed, Roedel decides to take his new family to California. Meanwhile, the ex-slave says he'll going to take off for Texas to look for his mother, once they're out of the danger zone, through which he'll stay with Roedel. For they've heard Mackeson, now a Jesse-James type land pirate, has said he's going to come by and finish him. As they're camped out, Roedel with his wife and baby son, or nephew, his bushwacker locks sheared, signifying his return to civilized life, they hear a noise and see Mackeson and one last diehard coming through the woods on horseback. He offers Mackeson some chicory, and asks what they're about. They tell him Quantrill and Black John have been killed, their heads put on pikes, paraded through town, with photos in papers. Itz over. But not for them. They're heading back to Freeport for a drink. "Hell, man, there's 200 federals in Freeport, you can't go in there." "Wrong, Dutchy. I am going in there. For certain sure going in there. I want a drink. They have drinks in Freeport."
"They'll kill ya. Best stay clear out of there."
"I don't think so, Dutchy. I don't reckon I'll clear out of where I was born. You see, that there was my hometown. And I reckon I'll go on in and have me a drink there."
"They'll kill you sure."
"(Laughs) What a horrible fate. Oh, what a horrible fate!"
Then Roedel whips his shotgun on him. These men don't care about their own lives, and would think nothing of killing the four of them. He draws a bead on Mackeson, can kill him if he wants. But he draws the bead up. The camera flips on Mackeson, light eyed and hovering, floating above Dutchy on horseback, completely fearless, shifting back and forth as his horse moves, studying him. A predator. A specific predator. An eagle. An American eagle. As American as the eagle in Bill the Butcher's glass eye. I believe that is what Ang Lee is trying to show with the camera work. This man is truly free. Truly American. He may be a sadistic and incorrigible feral, but he's a slave to no man, and that fits Dutchy Hegel's definition. Nor is he what the man on the other end of the firestick has become: a pre-suburbanite. "Come on, Turner," Pitt finally says, as always with a bit of mock in his voice, and he turns the horse south to Freeport, and with him goes whatever America really was...to die. To be killed by whatever America is, and let me tell you, friend, it ain't as much as itz jewish publicists claim.
This scene really moved me, almost to tears, the first time I saw it, a couple months ago. By god,
I'm not a cog.
I'm not a resource.
I'm a man.
And if no one else take me serious, well so I take myself.
And that is worth killing or dying over.
The sight of the last two Missouri freemen, one of them shot through the mouth, unable to enunciate because of his buckshot palate, but still game and untame; the other a pure-out wildman riding back through the woods in search of the way we were, it pulls at you. Why does nothing good ever last? Why does the scum always rise to the top? Why don't the good guys ever win?
Watching it a second time a couple days after seeing Gibson's "Passion," I could only think of how much better a filmmaker Lee is than Gibson. Gibson in two hours of stagey torture didn't get near what Lee captured in the Mackeson character and his feral indomitability. Maybe it's just that I prefer someone willing to fight and die for his Cause more than someone willing to suffer and die for it. Better murder than martyr, I say. Better Mackeson than Jesus. Better to discriminate and fight than dissolve and love. Mackeson's, as I say, a Southern Bill the Butcher, the guy who protected his own New York turf from Irish invaders in "Gangs of New York." All Pitt's really doing is sticking up for his people and his way of life. I just have a funny feeling that the wrong side won. I have a funny feeling that the North winning wasn't progress. I have a funny feeling that there's a straight line from the Roedel character, killer of fifteen men, to the pitiful whitemice victims sucking each other off at nigger behest in the Wichita Massacre, then driving to ATM for money before lying down in snow to await kill shot. I can't help but think of the little kid here in Missouri whose name, if I recall, was Jake Robel, who was carjacked to death by a nigger the likes of which the descendants of Jake Roedel are too Christian-goopy to deal with. I got a feeling when we put down men like Pitt Mackeson we committed suicide in the name of Christ and compassion. Biology deals a rough hand, and Christianity has never trumped it, lies about Resurrection be damned. This world is all there ever was, is, or will be. It ain't no fun when the Rapturebunny's got the gun.
Lee may even be making the case that America the land of the free can't survive not merely public schooling, but the written word itself. The Southerners are depicted as illiterate, yet knowing all they need to know to farm and fight effectively. Roedel seems to be the only one who can read. He's often shown poring over a book. The rest of the boys ask him to read letters taken from prisoners. There's a stark difference in the cultures at odds here, very much along the lines Mr. Evans pointed out. Let's make a chain: the written word leads to public schools leads to mass indoctrination leads to slavery. No one would ever think to question the value of teaching people to read, so let's question it. Is it possible that what we call civilization is built on reading, and that reading is mind indoctrination at least as much as mind extension? Would we be better off if the ten percent capable of college material were trained, and the rest left to their own devices? If not, you must be prepared to argue that the mass of "input" called "education" is on the whole true and worthwhile; a collective positive. I think that is quite debatable. I think, per Twain, another good Missourian, that it is better to remain ignorant than to know things that "just ain't so." What is public school but an attempt to indoctrinate things that "just ain't so" before the student has enough experience of the world to tell him otherwise? Was America freer before or after public schools became ubiquitous? Was America freer when her government was dominated by Southerners or by Northeasterners?
How are we doing today, now that the mass-uniform Northern spirit dominates everywhere, and the specific items of indoctrination are determined by izzies who picked up where Lincoln left off?
Wouldn't you rather take your chances dealing with the odd feral Mackeson out to do you in, in exchange for genuine freedom of mind and money? If you're a VNN reader, by God, I hope your answer is yes.
Tobey Maguire did a fantastic job portraying "Dutchy" Roedel. I don't know if he gave Roedel a flat aspect for his youth or his Dutchiness, or both. But it works. For example, when Quantrill gives his thrilling speech to whoop the boys prior to the ride on Lawrence, the farmers are rebel yelling, while Dutchy just blinks twice. He's got it in him, it just isn't as close to the surface. He does have a sort of slow wryness that I've seen in my own relatives. Germans are very stable people; they make great neighbors and soldiers. It is unfortunate that their character and mentality is generally such that they can be very easily misled because they lack the imagination or cunning to see that things political cannot be taken at face value. Too often in pop culture we get the tiresome chirpy cheery peppy Irish type. Nothing wrong with this type, it's just that fuck the Irish. There are other people out there who like to see themselves represented once in while. How seldom is anyone of the background of Germans like Roedel portrayed. Almost never. Maguire gets his character just right. He looks and acts like people I'm related to. The difference in his portrayal of, say, Rydell vs. Roedel is the difference between good makeup and good bone structure. Maguire hits his mark exactly, as far as I'm concerned. The way he says, "You know I am," real slow and straight-eyed, when Black John says he's heard bad things about his performance in Lawrence -- i.e., sparing the innocent elderly Mackeson was hot to put to the ball. The way the kid doesn't get mad when others cast aspersions on his background, but simply fights hard and keeps his mouth shut - proves himself. That is echt Deutsch, as any war will show. I don't know if reviewers praised Maguire for his work here, but he did an excellent job. Really, the whole cast did well, even Jewel did a nice job. Jonathan Rhys Meyers was perfect as Pitt Mackeson, he reminded me of Jay of Jay and Silent Bob fame in the Kevin Smith movies. Very interesting character, very evocative of a type and attitude that you don't see anymore. Because there's no room for it. Because the system is designed to prevent its occurrence, to drug it away with Ritalin. Itz a type we'll need for the coming revolution.
But like I say, I truly do wonder whether freedom and civilization are irreconcilable, thoughts occasioned by the Mackeson character. Because the men who produce liberty are long way from the men liberty produces. I mean, this would be a great guy to fight alongside, but I sure wouldn't want to live next to him. All around here in Kirksville are Southern types who could easily fit on the horses making up Quantrill's cavalry. And there are bad-seed families, shitcrickers, "American Independents," as I'm told they used to be called back in the decades before I was born -- people who truly hate government and just want to be left alone. People who can do everything, and don't need anything. In a word, Americans. Not like these washed-out pastel suburbans we've become today, like that GEICO human relations guy in the tv ad praising the gecko. We've come a long ways, baby: most of it down and backwards.
Go rent this movie and ask yourself at what point White evolution veal-stalled.
And what you can do to unbox it.
ALEX LINDER