3:10 to Yuma Then and Now

Peter Travers calls the most recent 3:10 to Yuma deconstructionist rather than revisionist, claiming that “Despite kicking up the violence quotient… and freighting Freud into the subtext…, [director James] Mangold digs in his spurs as Dan takes on Wade’s gang.” Taking an opposite stance, Roger Ebert claims the film “restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence.” David Denby, on the other hand, calls the film “familiar,” not because it remakes the 1957 original but because it embraces conventions of the traditional Western, except now they have a harder edge. According to Denby, “3:10 to Yuma is a remake of a 1957 Western directed by Delmer Daves, and this version—directed by James Mangold and written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, who amplified Elmore Leonard’s 1953 story and Halsted Welles’s script for the original—is faster, more cynical, and more brutal than the first.”

In spite of its nods toward the Iraq war, we agree with Denby’s assertion. The remake of 3:10 to Yuma merely amplifies conventions of the traditional Western. The original focused more intently on the dried up land, famished cattle, and the rain that finally comes.

For us, the remake also nearly erases the environmental history illustrated by the original 1957 version of the film. Instead, the 2007 version uses post-Civil War politics and railroad corruption and land grabbing as a backdrop for an exploration of the hyper-violence associated with the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib scandal. The 1957 version from director Daves, on the other hand, places water rights and drought at the forefront. Although the Daves film also maintains conventions of the traditional Western, because it places water at its center, it more accurately highlights the environmental impact of both progressive and populist versions of progress.

The Daves version of the film foregrounds the desert conditions from its opening shots of a trail crossing an arid land and a stagecoach throwing dust up from its wheels forward. Although Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) and his gang rob a stagecoach, the lack of rain and its impact on ranching takes precedence for the Evans family witnessing the crime. Dan Evans (Van Heflin) laments three years of drought killing his cattle, and when his wife, Alice (Leora Dana), notes that Al Parker has a stream that won’t run dry, Dan explains that six months of water rights costs $200.00. His only solution seems to be the possibility of rain. He won’t, as Alice suggests, beg or borrow the money. When he looks at the land, however, he does go to town to borrow the money because it will get them through six months, and, according to Dan, “by then it will rain. All this will be green in six months. The cattle will be fat” and they won’t be tired all the time. They will be happy.

The drought affects every aspect of the plotline in the 1957 version. When Dan attempts to borrow money, the banker refuses to loan it to him because of the drought, for example: “What with the drought, nobody pays back,” he says. Dan chooses to help the sheriff capture Wade because of this drought, as well, tricking the desperado into staying longer at the bar to pay him for his and his boys’ work, and for his “tired cattle.” When they put Wade in handcuffs, Dan explains, “My cattle is dying. I’ve got to take care of them.” And when Mr. Butterfield (Robert Emhardt) offers $200.00 to take Wade to Contention to catch the train, Dan volunteers.

While they wait in a Contention hotel room for the 3:10 train to Yuma, Wade even uses the drought to convince Dan to set him free for a price: “Three years of drought don’t seem so bad,” he says and talks about a rancher surviving ten years of drought because a “big enough outfit had plenty of water.” With Wade’s $7000.00, Dan can build a big enough outfit to survive the drought. Dan of course refuses, but we hear thunder in the background when Alice rides into Contention wearing a white cape. We again hear the thunder as Dan and Wade walk out of the back of the hotel, and wind blows up along a fence line. After cattle roll by, Dan and Wade hide behind water barrels, another nod to the film’s central theme. And after Dan and Wade jump onto the Yuma train and wave at Alice waiting in her wagon, the rain begins, amplifying Dan’s success. Both the $200.00 for water rights and the rain will bring back the grasslands, feed his cattle, and save his family.

The 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma, on the other hand, mentions the drought only in reference to a debt Dan Evans (Christian Bale) owes for three months of water rights and medicine for his youngest son’s (Ben Petry) tuberculosis. Instead, as Peter Travers explains, the film “kick[s] up the violence quotient (a gatling gun figures in a coach robbery) and freight [s] Freud into the subtext” while reinforcing the original film’s “moral code.” The film weakens Dan’s character as a way to update the film and connect it with the current Iraqi situation, but it valorizes messages about civilizing the West similar to those in the original. Here environmental history is nearly erased to highlight a post-Civil War setting constructed as parallel to Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

Connections with the Iraq War are emphasized throughout the film. Dan lost a leg in the Civil War not as an enlisted man but as a Massachusetts militiaman conscripted into the Army, and he, like National Guard veterans, fights for his benefits. Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) is tortured with electric shocks outside a railroad tunnel when he is caught after escaping Dan and the rest of the posse, paralleling the torture endured by Abu Ghraib prisoners. The hyper-violence throughout the film connects the two wars, as well, as does the references to the railroad as the source of Dan’s woes, rather than drought.

Nonetheless, the 3:10 to Yuma remake reflects the ongoing debate about the environment of the American West. Worster even suggests that “one of the surprises of our time is that people have begun to acknowledge their continuing dependency on nature wherever they live” (Under Western Skies 252), including the American West.

Environmental Cartoons of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s: A Critique of Post-World War II Progress?

The 1955 Warner Bros’ cartoon, Goofy Gophers and the Lumberjerks (Freleng), ends with a line from one of the gophers that illustrates the 1950s lifestyle: “Isn’t our house much better than it was before?” he asks his partner as he looks up at a “tree” built of furniture sawed from what had once been their tree home. A television set tops off this house of furniture that stands alone among the stumps—what’s left of a forest clear-cut for its lumber. The gophers seem so happy with their new home—merely commenting that “it will be better when we have electricity.” But after seeing the consequences of “progress” as depicted in the cartoon, devastation of our forests, are we meant to answer “yes” to the gopher’s question? Does the cartoon argue that “our house [is] much better than it was before?”

Jaime Weinman seems to think just the opposite when she argues that Goofy Gophers and the Lumberjerks (1955, Warner Bros, Freleng) is a model “enviro-toon.” She claims that it “never preaches . . . . And instead of showing that only evil people harm the environment, it shows that trees are being chopped down in order to make the things we use every day—in other words, we are the ones harming the environment” (Weinman). Unlike cartoons with anthropomorphized animals or plant life alone, what Weinman calls “enviro-toons” not only humanize nature; they critique abuse of nature and the natural, especially by humans.

We examined over 500 cartoons from the period prior to the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s (from the Warner Bros., Walt Disney, Van Bueren, Paramount, Sullivan, MGM, and the Fleischer studios) and found that such enviro-toons were rare and, as a group, were not attributable to a particular studio or director. Nonetheless cartoons such as Lumberjerks, Porky Chops (1949, Warner Bros, Arthur Davis), or a number of other environmentally-oriented animated shorts from the classical era of Hollywood animation serve as potentially powerful cultural productions. For animators like Freleng, environmental devastation and negative consequences of progress served as comic plot devices rather than a cultural critique. Like Jaime Weinman, however, we argue that these environmental cartoons stand out as model enviro-toons, chiefly because they are less obvious and, as Weinman puts it, “less preachy,” since rhetoric gains strength when its message encounters less resistance. Cartoons like Goofy Gophers and the Lumberjerksaddress the consequences of so-called progress in ways less obvious (and perhaps more effective) than New Deal documentaries like The River from the 1930s and 40s—and even more recent efforts at environmentalism, in such series as “Captain Planet.”

Our analysis of enviro-toons from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s revealed three narrative and aesthetic patterns:

• the power of nature over the human world

• the need for controlling human intervention and nurturing the natural world in order to strengthen their interdependence

• criticism of human exploitation of the natural world

The following analysis discusses representative works in each of these categories, demonstrating the often subtle but nonetheless powerful ecological messages conveyed within the animated shorts. Keeping in mind that the historical and cultural contexts in which these cartoons were produced vary, we argue that ultimately, beliefs about technology, consumerism, and the natural are reflected in, and sometimes critiqued by, these Classic animated shorts.

Nature Versus the Human World

Some cartoons from all three decades examined during this period demonstrate the power of nature over the human world. These more traditional cartoons seem to be a bi-product of the ongoing conflict between “the machine and the natural” (Klein 79). As Klein argues, cartoons are a product of technology and seem also to glorify it ((76). Klein compares this technology behind cartoons to the machina versatilis, which appeared in Italy in the 17^th century and, as Jonson suggests, harkened in a “Mechanick Age” (quoted in Klein 76), an industrial age in which industries were causing massive deforestation in England. Industrialization widened the gap between nature and culture, between humans and the natural world. Nature, then, was seen as either a resource source to be exploited or an “enemy” to be controlled. Carolyn Merchant’s study of changes in representations of nature in New England and Annette Kolodny’s examination of American literary representations of women and nature demonstrate the ramification of this historical change. Ecocritics like Lynn White, Jr. and Frederick Turner historicized these representations in useful ways, concluding, too, that the nature/culture binary widened after industrialization in the West.  

 Some early Felix the Cat cartoons foreground this reemphasized nature/culture binary when they show how stormy weather can spoil a picnic (April Maze) or how sea creatures can fight back to save their own (Neptune Nonsense). April Maze (1930, Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer), a Felix the Cat ‘toon from Sullivan Studios, seems to anticipate New Deal programs that saw nature as a powerful force needing both respect and taming. Tennessee Valley Authority projects, for example, promoted a system of dams to control flooding on big rivers—and to bring electricity to the rural poor. April Maze (1930 Sullivan Studios) is shot in black and white and offers a bleak picture of nature. Michael Barrier explains that Otto Messmer, the cartoon’s director, “never let his audience forget that Felix was as artificial as his environment” (45). 

Cartoons from the 1940s, too, reflected this conflict between humans and the natural world. Perhaps as a reaction to World War II, however, superheroes like Superman fought natural elements and won. Norman Klein concurs, suggesting that the World War had just as much of an impact on cartoons as did Hollywood movies like film noir and screwball comedies (183). The Superman series (Fleischer) from this period seems to reflect this impact most visibly. They also exaggerate the machina versatilis, ”update [ing] an old theme of theirs, the film screen as machine” (Klein 86). According to Klein, “The entire screen seems to be made of steel, like a machine housed in black, corrugated metal, with gray canyons beneath skyscrapers, and diabolical machines instead of ghouls” (86).

Several Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s highlight this sustained conflict between humans (or anthropomorphized animal figures) and the natural world, unsurprising coming from the more conservative Disney Studio. Flowers and Trees (1932 Disney, Bert Gillett) , for example, foregrounds idyllic nature’s triumph over an evil anthropomorphized tree stump. As the first color short from Disney, Flowers and Trees won an Academy Award with its Technicolor dancing trees and flowers, romantic tree love story, and overturned jealousy. But the tree stump’s jealous rage is thwarted by birds, who literally put out his fire. The tree stump clearly represents the evil human world, since his tongue is a snake and his goal is to destroy the tree lovers and their forest. In the end, the stump destroys himself and reinforces his non-flora status, since vultures encircle his corpse. Donald Duck and Chip N Dale cartoons of the period follow a similar pattern. All of these cartoons emphasize the power of nature over the human (or anthropomorphized animal) world.

Encouraging Interdependence

Other cartoons, however, demonstrate the need for controlling human intervention and nurturing the natural world to strengthen their interdependence, most of which were distributed in the 1930s during the height of the New Deal. These cartoons suggest that an equal relationship is possible, even in the modern world, where technology and industry threaten nature and the natural world. But they also do demonstrate an awareness that humans can impact negatively on their natural environments. Except for a near-remake, all of the cartoons we noted that follow this pattern come from the 1930s, primarily after the Hays Code became more stringently enforced. Cartoon story lines between 1934 and 1938 seemed most affected by the Hays Office agenda (Klein 46). Klein states that the “controller persona” in each cartoon “increasingly had to speak for justice and perseverance” (47), even in relation to elements of the natural world. Klein even suggests that Might Mouse saved the day “like a cartoon New Dealer damming a flooding river” (47). Four of the five cartoons represented here seem to follow this narrative structure.

Another Felix the Cat cartoon, Neptune Nonsense (1936, Van Bueren, Burt Gillett and Tom Palmer), its near remake, Seapreme Court (the near remake) (1954 Famous Studios/ Paramount, Seymour Kneitel), Molly Moo Cow and the Butterflies (1935, Van Bueren, Burt Gillett and Tom Palmer), and Spinning Mice (1935, Van Bueren, Burt Gillett and Tom Palmer)—both from the Van Bueren Studio—and the Warner Brothers Bosco cartoon, Trees Knees (1930, Warner Bros, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising) seem to encourage interdependence between species, both in the wild and in captivity.

Criticism of Human Exploitation of the Natural World

More important to the environmental movement (and to us), however, are those cartoons primarily from the post-World War II era of progress, like Porky Chops (1949, Warner Bros, Arthur Davis) and Lumber Jerks (1955, Warner Bros, Friz Freleng). We argue that these cartoons critique human exploitation of nature in more subtle, yet dramatic—and effective—ways than do the other cartoons we examined. These cartoons illustrate the consequences of rampant consumerism that serves as a sign of progress—devastation of the natural world. Instead of looking at nature from the skewed perspective of a speeding cars, these cartoons (among others) show us what’s wrong with what Wilson calls “the cultural taming of the American Wilderness” (34) and provide real reasons for embracing Aldo Leopold’s conservation esthetic.

For example, two Warner Brothers’ cartoons seem to illustrate Aldo Leopold’s view of recreation gone wrong: Tweet Tweet Tweety (1950, Warner Bros, Friz Freleng) and Hare Conditioned (1945, Warner Bros, Chuck Jones).  Tweet Tweet Tweety (1950 Warner Bros) opens in a National Forest overridden with Trailers. A sign commands, “Bird and Game Refuge—No Hunting or Fishing, by order of the Game Commissioner,” but, ironically, the object of the cartoon is Sylvester’s hunt for Tweety. The cartoon, however, does more than highlight Sylvester’s failure to capture his bird. Instead, as in Leopold’s explanation of recreation in a mechanized world, it juxtaposes natural wonders with signs of “progress” in a modern culture. In a National Forest, we see Acme Bridge Builders equipment. Redwood trees are cut down, too, their logs floating down a stream to a saw mill. A natural geyser erupts, but only when a clock (another sign of progress) urges it on. At the end, to save himself, Tweety shuts off dam water. Sylvester, as usual, fails, but dams, bridge building equipment and sawmills seem also to have won, mechanizing nature even in National Parks like Yellowstone.

Hare Conditioned(1945, Warner Bros, Chuck Jones), on the other hand, takes the artificiality of outdoor recreation to an extreme. The Bugs Bunny cartoon opens up in what looks like a campground in a national forest. Bugs hops beside a tent and a campfire, but then a whistle blows, the scene changes to a long shot that reveals an audience seated in front of Bugs and his camp, and the camp scene turns into a department store window display. Here outdoor recreation is not only mechanized (as Leopold argues). It’s an illusion.

Even though Fox Pop(1942, Warner Bros, Chuck Jones) came out during WWII, it critiques consumerism in two ways, one of which clearly takes the environment—or at least animal life—into consideration. The cartoon opens with a fox stealing a radio, taking it into the woods, and destroying it. Two magpies wonder why the fox made such a racket, so the fox tells his story—in flashback. The radio serves as source of an advertisement that reels the fox in. Outside a window, “Fox Pop” hears about silver foxes being worn about town by the up and coming socialites, so he craves such stardom and works hard to get himself trapped and captured—even going so far as to paint himself silver. At the silver fox farm, foxes are locked up in jail cells and ready to break out. A large silver fox in the cell beside our hero’s tries to warn fox about his fate, but the little fox wants to decorate a socialite’s neck—that is, until he reads about losing his skin. He escapes and a funny chase scene ensues, with dogs beating him up even after a creek washes off the silver paint. No longer lured in by advertising, the fox destroys the radio. Rampant consumerism—even when commodities were being rationed—proves too dangerous for our protagonist, the fox, who happily escapes with his skin. But the radio as purveyor of a message so powerful it reaches even its prospective victim, the fox, seems the worst culprit here. The cartoon seems to say that it’s not the silver fox farm or even the executioner bearing an ax who’s at fault. It’s a manipulative advertising campaign that creates a market for silver foxes and, without the ads, foxes would be safe.

In 1948, according to Klein, the studio system changed. Studios were no longer allowed to maintain vertical monopolies, so their theatre chains were sold out, and film (and cartoon) distribution was transferred to “independent jobbers” (206). By 1953, Jack Warner “ordered the animation units [temporarily] to close down, to make way for 3D movies” (Klein 206). Television became a new media, and fewer movie screens were available for audiences. All of these factors led to what Klein calls a “stripped-down” version of cartoons. Klein argues that a “mixture of ebullience and paranoia can be seen very clearly in fifties cartoons, in the stories and the graphics” (207). According to Klein, this mixture “is particularly evident in cartoons about consumer life” (207). The conflict between humans and machines consumerism has bred is explored in cartoons like Duck Amuck (1953, Warner Bros, Chuck Jones). And in cartoons like Little Brown Jug (1948, Famous Studios/Paramount, Seymour Kneitel), Porky Chops (1949, Warner Bros, Arthur Davis), Boobs in the Woods(1950, Warner Bros, Robert McKimson) and Lumber Jerks (1955, Warner Bros, Friz Freleng) the conflict extends to the natural resources necessary to create consumer goods.

           

Of the cartoons from the 1930s, 1940s and 50s we viewed, however, the one most clearly an enviro-toon is Goofy Gophers and the Lumber Jerks (1955, Warner Bros, Friz Freleng). Lumber Jerks (1955 Warner Bros) seems to emanate from an attitude in 1950s America Klein calls “Consumer Cubism” (210), “an obsession with the efficient, angular plan.” The faster a consumer could gain access to goods, the better. Klein claims that “individualism and democracy were being redefined in terms of consumer desire. The homogeneous surface, open and ‘free,’ came to stand in for America’s imperium” (210).  These attitudes were reflected in both narrative and aesthetics of cartoons after 1954.

Like Porky Chops(1949 Warner Bros) and the Donald Duck/Chip N Dale cartoons (Disney), Lumber Jerks first focuses on saving one tree in a forest—but the conclusion differs dramatically. Two cheerful gophers scurry toward their home tree, but when they go up into the hollow of the tree, they find it has been cut down and carried away. The two gophers take steps to retrieve their tree—what they call their property—tracking it to a river and then picking it out of the hundreds of logs floating on the water. They climb on their tree and row away but cannot fight the current and nearly go over a waterfall. Once they escape, one gopher exclaims, “I’m bushed,” and the two fall asleep, waking up only after entering a lumber mill and living through a saw blade cutting their tree trunk in two.

After seeing the devastation around them, the gophers state the obvious about the repercussions of consumerism. One of the gophers explains, “It looks like they are bent on the destruction of our forests,” and the scene shifts to the mill’s workings. One “shot” shows trees ground into sawdust being made into artificial fireplace logs. Another shows an entire tree being “sharpened” to produce one toothpick. Then the gophers discover what had happened to their own tree: “They’re going to make furniture out of our tree,” states one of the gophers.

But the idea of ownership of consumer goods extends to the gophers and their tree home. They wish to reclaim their property, their own possession, so the other gopher exclaims, “That is definitely our property. We must think of a way to repossess it.” The gophers siphon the gas out of the furniture truck and, when it breaks down, “steal” their tree’s furniture from the truck. They build a tree house with the furniture, adding branches for good measure and topping the tree off with a television set. The cartoon ends with one of the gophers telling the other, “Isn’t our home much better than it was before ….[we have] Television… and just think how much better it will be with electricity!” Because the gophers view their tree home as a possession not unlike the furniture produced from its wood, they seem pleased with their “repossession.” But the enviro-toon leaves viewers feeling ambivalent about the price of progress.

 Lumber Jerks (1955, Warner Bros, Friz Freleng) combines a critique of consumerism with a statement about its source—natural wilderness—but seems to also endorse interdependence between humans and the natural world (and between progress and conservation), at least to the extent that furniture built from a tree trunk can return to the forest as the Goofy Gophers’ home. With its overt focus on consumerism, however, the ‘toon goes further than the other shorts we examined here. It seems to leave viewers questioning the Goofy Gopher’s conclusion stated in this article’s opening: “Isn’t our house much better than it was before?”

As Klein suggests in his discussion of Tex Avery’s Car of Tomorrow and Farm of Tomorrow, consumers may become “victimized by the very machines that promise an easier, more extravagant life” (211). After all, the consumer goods that make up the trunk of one tree were built from the trees of an entire forest. Lumberjerks, especially, reflects an increasing ambivalence toward technology and post-World War II progress in an increasingly more complex (and anxiety-ridden) nuclear age. Here the Goofy Gopher’s successfully negotiate between the wonders of modernism and its impact on both natural and human worlds Paul Wells discusses. But it’s a negotiation that’s impossible in the world outside cartoons. Still, Klein’s argument that “cartoons [are] ever the barometer of changes in entertainment” may also include changes in mainstream American culture. Unlike cartoons that either maintain the nature/culture binary, or those that seek to reconcile it through the intervention of a controller, classic shorts that critique our treatment of the natural world respond explicitly to changes in the American cultural context and illustrate an ambivalence towards Modernism and its ramifications.

All three categories of cartoons we have highlighted, however, serve as enviro-toons that do more than present nature or a landscape; they confront the natural in increasingly complex ways.

After studying approximately 500 cartoons from the classic period, our conclusions are simple: Even within the constraints both technology and ideology placed on the enviro-toons included here, at least a few cartoons from the 1930s, 40s and 50s stand out as powerful statements both for conservation and against environmental waste. If Wells and Klein are right, these few enviro-toons do engage with repercussions of progress in a modern world. The environmental movement as we know it did not begin with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.  In a nod to conservationists like Aldo Leopold, environmentalism was a growing concern before during and after World War II, at least in the world of animated film.

A West and Western that Works: *Silver City*

A West and a Western that Works?

Sherman Alexie and Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals illustrates a different way to view the West—not as empire, but as a partner, a goal that parallels Joni Adamson’s vision of a “garden” and Dan Daggett’s description of its gardeners. Most recent Westerns, however, hark back to traditional narratives that valorize transforming a savage wilderness or desert into a civilized “empire.” Western films after World War II, then, tend to follow one of three patterns: Although these western films primarily draw on more traditional perspectives of the American West, at least a few films highlight mainstream environmentalist approaches to the natural world. The best of these films, however, move beyond the mainstream to valorize Joni Adamson’s garden metaphor and a middle place of environmental justice.

 Although they do attempt to address current political and cultural concerns, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), 3:10 to Yuma (2007) Appaloosa (2008), and There Will Be Blood (2007) all embrace a traditional western narrative, with little reference to the environmental history on which the West was constructed. As if it were anticipating the 2008 devastation of pine forests of the West caused at least partly by relying on one environmental strategy, Riders of the Whistling Pines (1949) foregrounds a mainstream environmentalist message that valorizes the perspective of forest rangers over community members and a lumber magnate. Only films like Smoke Signals and Silver City fulfill Adamson’s goal, reinforcing a “garden” as a metaphor for the values and concerns of multicultural groups that fall outside mainstream American environmentalism and placing multiple voices into discussions about human and nonhuman nature.

In what looks like an anticipation of a 2008 eco-disaster, a lodgepole pine beetle infestation in the high country of New Mexico and Colorado, Riders of the Whistling Pines comes close to fulfilling Joni Adamson’s environmental justice aim but is limited by its reliance on solely mainstream environmentalist views. The film “discusses differently situated human practices and perspectives on nature” (Adamson xv) and arrives at a contingent and localized consensus on how best to protect forests. In Riders of the Whistling Pines Gene Autry illustrates earnest, but potentially deadly, attempts to save a forest by spraying it with DDT. The remedies applied in the film seem effective until assessed, understood, and critiqued in relation to our current context, a context that demonstrates that this use of chemicals serves as one of Dan Daggett’s “failed remedies” with long-term detrimental consequences for water, soil and wildlife in the Pacific Northwest. With its mainstream environmentalist message, Riders of the Whistling Pines falls short because it valorizes only one view—that of the park rangers who act as environmentalists working to save a forest in spite of possible detrimental consequences to both humans and their domesticated animals.

Other films invite viewers to “come together to discuss differently situated human practices and perspectives on nature; and arrive at consensus… about what our role in nature will be” (Adamson 184). Smoke Signals’ attention to multicultural voices is clear. But John Sayles’ Silver City also provides a space for multiple voices, especially those of the illegal migrant workers exploited in the film. Silver City valorizes the multiple voices found in Sayles’ Lone Star but adds nature to the mix by illustrating the continuing conflict between federal control and private ownership of lands and resources. In Silver City, a George W. Bush-like candidate for governor of Colorado, Dickie Pilager (Chris Cooper), advocates for small government and private ownership of government lands but unknowingly uncovers a murder and an environmental catastrophe.

Silver City introduces its focus on environmental concerns, murder, and politics from its opening montage sequence of election-focused sound bites and out-of-focus images of flags and political speakers. Bands of white neon foreground the environmental message presented by Pilager’s campaign with the title, “Richard Pilager cares about Colorado,” and a commercial filming in front of a lake, “the bucolic fishing thing,” Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss), Pilager’s campaign manager, explains.

During the sequence, however, the murder and its eco-disaster foundation are introduced while Pilager voices his concern for the environment in a posed political advertisement and catches a human corpse instead of a fish. When the body smells of apricots, an environmental political message transforms into the site of a murder investigation and a possible environmental disaster. Through a covert murder investigation led by private detective Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston), Silver City foregrounds mainstream environmentalist concerns (toxic waste from silver mining runoff), but it also highlights environmental justice concerns by placing multicultural voices at the center, the voices of migrant workers mistreated and misused almost as virulently as the Earth.

Danny begins his investigation in Mitch Paine’s (Tim Roth), his old newspaper editor’s, web office where the political machine behind Pilager is revealed. Mitch’s website also shows how privatization is (still) constructed as the best solution for lands in the West. The site illustrates the Pilager family’s history of greed, questioning the Pilagers’ claims that their ancestor was a lone wolf prospector and explaining that the family had already diversified its interests after 1893 when the silver bubble burst, all in relation to the Bentel Corporation, run by Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson), who wishes to own and control all of the public lands in Colorado.

To ensure private control of public lands and their resources will be maintained, Benteen finances Pilager’s gubernatorial race, since he and Dickie’s father, Senator Judson Pilager (Michael Murphy), realize they can easily manipulate Dickie. When Benteen and Dickie ride out on horses to see the land, for example, Benteen tells him this is a land where “No Americans are allowed” because the bureaucrats own it all. “The Bureau of Land Management, the National Parks, the states” can’t see the big picture, which, for Benteen, means privatization. He asserts, “The land was meant for the citizens, not the pencil pushers in Washington,” claiming that they must “liberate those resources for the American people” and for men of vision like Benteen who know how to use them. Through a patriotic speech foregrounding private ownership, Benteen convinces Dickie to work to privatize public lands.

The film also shows how this view of private ownership has dire environmental consequences. An ex-mining engineer leading a tour of the Silver City mines, Casey Lyle (Ralph Waite), one of Raven’s suspects in the case, reveals some of the eco-disasters perpetrated by Benteen and Pilager, owners of the mine. He says, “You know, we think we can wound this planet. We think we can cut costs and stick the money in our pockets and just walk away with it. But some day the bill comes due.” When Danny tells him that he’s being watched, Casey explains how he took on Benteen and the Silver City Mine, so Casey and his crew would clean up their ecosystem. Casey had found acres and acres of tailings piled up and measured nasty PH ratings from the water around the mine because Benteen and Pilager were using and unsafely disposing of cyanide and pushing containments to one side, so the cyanide was getting in the water system. Casey’s plan to stop Benteen failed when he was fired for misuse of funds. But his story helps Danny begin solving the mystery of both the murder and the eco-disaster associated with it.

The trail of the murder victim, Lazaro Huerta (Donevon Martinez), however, leads Danny to another environmental disaster, one based on environmental injustice for illegal immigrant workers. As Al Gedicks asserts, “Native peoples are under assault on every continent because their lands contain a wide variety of valuable resources needed for industrial and military production” (168). Benteen exploits Mexican migrant workers in two ways: He literally exploits their labor for little compensation and at great cost to their health and welfare. And he exploits what was once their land for unfettered profit.

Sayles adds these multicultural voices to the discussion when Danny hires Tony Guerra (Sal Lopez) to help him find the source of the victim’s injuries and of the illegal migrant worker industry. Tony discovers that Vince Esparza (Luis Saguar) oversees illegal workers, including two, Fito (Aaron Vieyra) and Rafi (Hugo E Carbajal), who witnessed Lazaro’s death. Esparza nearly kills Tony, but he survives to tell Danny about the two workers he had intended to meet. At the mine, Fito and Rafi tell Danny that Lazaro was killed at the slaughterhouse where they were forced to work as part of the cleaning crew after midnight, washing the floors down with water mixed with chloride. In a flashback we see Lazaro fall from a scaffold when an out of control water hose knocks him to his death. According to Lazaro’s co-workers, Fito and Rafi, Esparza forced them to take Lazaro’s body to the mine and dump it in the shaft. When they returned three days later, the body was gone and the mine floor was full of water.

Now that the truth about Lazaro’s death is revealed, the truth about environmental degradation is also unearthed when Danny explores the mine to discover how the body floated from the mineshaft to the lake where it was found. When the police arrive at the mine, Fito and Rafi, migrant workers, run away and Danny grabs onto a timber near the shaft. When the timber breaks, Danny falls into the water-filled shaft and discovers why the body smelled of apricots. In the water around him are countless barrels labeled “toxic waste.” By solving the murder case, then, Danny also reveals an eco-disaster and seeks environmental justice for the migrant workers and for the aquatic life in the nearby lake. Esparza and his employer, Benteen, chose not to clean up toxic waste. They just dumped it into the mineshaft. Danny secretly reports his discovery to radical reporter Mitch Paine’s office staff knowing they will broadcast the news.

Even though the Pilagers and Benteens cover the entrance to the mine with concrete, and Mitch and his reporters can not uncover the waste containers, Danny addresses social injustices in the film. He sends Lazaro’s body home to Mexico and provides money for Lazaro’s family. And at the film’s conclusion, hundreds of dead fish appear on the lake where Dickie is giving another speech, with the patriotic song, “America the Beautiful” ringing in the background, highlighting eco-disaster rather than land acquisition and upsetting Dickie’s political ambitions.

Ultimately, the conflict between public and private ownership plays out against privatization in Silver City, even though the narrative seems to claim victory for Benteen in his quest to control all the land in Colorado. With public support from the governor’s office, public lands seem to become private investments, but the evidence that privatization and eco-disaster go hand in hand is overwhelming. The film’s parting scene of fish floating to the top of the poisoned lake gives us hope because it makes the ecological nightmare transparent and inserts the environment into a discussion that includes a variety of perspectives. When all voices—including that of nature—are in conversation, a middle place may be possible, the film asserts. 

Like Adamson, we have attempted here to highlight that middle place and “theorize a way of reading that provides us with the tools we need for building a more satisfying multicultural ecocriticism and a more inclusive, multicultural environmentalism that can be united with other social movements to create a more livable world for humans and nonhumans alike” (184). Our goal is to extend Adamson’s “middle place” to readings of classic and contemporary western films. For us, then, films like Smoke Signals and Silver City best reflect this “middle place” and highlight ways to build a “garden” without destroying the land. These films invite viewers to “come together to discuss differently situated human practices and perspectives on nature; and arrive at consensus… about what our role in nature will be” (Adamson 184).

As Worster explains, "They say that we can live without the old fantasy of a pristine, inviolate, edenic wilderness—it was, after all, never adequate to the reality of the natural world as we found it. But we could never really turn all of nature into artifact. Nor could we live without nature. For all our ingenuity, we sense that we need that independent, self-organizing, resilient biophysical world to sustain it. If nature were ever truly at an end, then we would be finished. It is not however, and we are not." (253-54) Perhaps the continuing popularity of the Western as a genre rests on this same lesson. Western films reflect the continuing debate about what is best for nature, but they also hark back to an American West where life itself depended on our attachment to the natural environment, an environment that may be what those western heroes were fighting about all along, a middle place where all are heard.