True Grit · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The last image is a woman walking away from a grave. One sleeve hangs empty. The land around her is flat and grey and going to winter, and the voice that has been telling you this story for two hours finally says how old it is: "Time just gets away from us." That voice belongs to Mattie Ross at fifty-something, recalling the year she was fourteen and went into the Territory to see her father's killer dead. Start at the end, the way the Coens do, because everything in front of it was already being remembered.

On its surface True Grit is the most action-bound thing a movie can be: a Western, a revenge errand. A girl perceives a wrong — Tom Chaney shot her father over a horse and two gold pieces — and she acts to set it right. Hire the meanest marshal she can find, ride out, run the man down. Deleuze called this the action-image, and this particular shape of it the large form: a whole situation bears down on a person until one decisive act transforms it. The genre runs on it. The pressure is the milieu itself — Indian Territory, lawless, wintering — what Deleuze names the encompasser, the situation that calls the deed out of the character. The engine inside it is the binomial, force set against force: the girl and the ruined lawman against Chaney and Ned Pepper's gang. Tag the Western this way and its plumbing shows. Situation, then act, then the situation changed.

But watch how Deakins frames the riding. He shoots on long lenses that flatten the people against the plain and make them small without making them grand; the anamorphic width opens cold negative space around them. Deleuze has a name for this breathing: respiration-space, the way an action film alternates the vast milieu with the taut line of the pursuit drawn tight across it. The chase becomes a vector — his "line of the universe," a zig-zag stitched between places that don't otherwise connect: river town, dugout, the open field. The form is classical. The feeling is not. The light is flat or firelit, never golden, and gold is exactly what the genre usually trades in.

That refusal is where the action starts to hollow from inside. Take Rooster Cogburn. John Wayne played him loud and lovable; Bridges plays him ravaged — drunk, half-blind, morally crooked, much of his talk delivered in a mumble that makes you lean in. Deleuze would call this an inversion-image: the sublime frontier hero turned over to show his feeble underside, the marshal as wreck. And Bridges builds the wreck out of the body. The performance is a cinema of the body — what Deleuze calls the gest, a posture that carries a whole social history in it. Cogburn has stopped performing for anyone watching. His grit, when it finally comes in the open-field charge with the reins in his teeth, is desperate before it is heroic. Unforgiven taught the genre that the gunman's violence stains rather than redeems; McCabe & Mrs. Miller, with Zsigmond's underexposed winter light, took the gold away. True Grit inherits both and makes the hero a body that is failing in real time.

Now the turn that changes everything beneath it. The whole action picture sits inside a memory. Elizabeth Marvel's elderly Mattie bookends the film, which means the entire Territory ride is what Deleuze called an image-souvenir — a recollection, a former present summoned up from a long way off. A flashback, technically. Most films use one and move on. This one never leaves it, and in the coda it stops being a memory and becomes something stranger. Twenty-five years on, Mattie comes to claim Rooster's body and finds he has died and been moved. She stands in an empty plot, one-armed from the snakebite, the hymn going underneath. The people are gone. The land is bare and spoken over by a voice from a vanished present. Late Deleuze was drawn to exactly this: the stratigraphic image, an emptied landscape that an absent past speaks across, and the speech-act of someone caught in the act of legending herself — making her own life into a told thing. Carter Burwell scores it with worn Protestant hymns, "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," solo and spectral, the actual devotional music of the world being mourned. The retrospective frame is the whole point. The story is over before it starts. You are not watching grit being shown; you are listening to what grit cost, totted up by the person who paid.

That is the Coens' real move, and it is a quiet revision of an entire genre. They took the Western — cinema's purest action machine — and ran a current of time underneath the action, so the form remembers itself even as it performs. Bazin praised the Western for its mythic clarity; this one keeps the clarity and drains the myth, because a fourteen-year-old's certainty has hardened into a one-armed woman's rue. Watch it again and listen for the voice in the long silences. It was there the whole time, speaking from the end, and once you hear it the adventure plays as an elegy that happens to contain a gunfight.