FILM / Exorcism By Proxy / Steve Mitchell
Image © Warner Bros.
I would have been twelve, on the cusp of adolescence, and it would have been around the time my parents were separating, when I first saw Billy Jack in 1971. I know it was important to me in the moment, not only as an action film but as something meaningful, even necessary. It was an anthem which could propel me into my teenage years. I saw it multiple times in the theatre. I remember crying at the end, devastated by the injustice of Billy’s arrest.
Pardon the air quotes: Billy Jack is the story of an ex-Green Beret ‘half-breed Indian’ who protects an ‘alternative school’ somewhere in the Southwest from the nearby rich guy, his son, and the racist town folk. He turns up fashionably late to every situation. This allows us to witness the harassment, beating or murder of students, while also allowing us to witness Billy punishing the evil-doers. It’s a two-fer.
Most of the student body appear suspiciously white. They spend their time singing songs or doing improv theatre. They’re always ecstatically happy until someone chills their vibe or brings them down. They’re ‘hippies’, but very square ones, curiously drug-free and sexless. There’s a lot of mystical ‘Indian’ stuff thrown around and Billy appears to have supernatural powers as the result of a ceremony where he’s repeatedly bitten by a rattlesnake. We know he’s other-worldly because an Indian-sounding flute announces his arrival at every scene of injustice.
This is how America chooses to confront our demons, by enacting the struggle with an all-white cast. Anything else might be provocative. While we have learned, in the last few years, to cast visibly Black or Latinx actors, we continue to either portray these characters as disadvantaged white people, or another form of the human race altogether. We can accept noble, human characters who don’t look like us, as long as they are portrayed by people who look like us.
Natalie Wood played a Puerto Rican in brownface for West Side Story. Angelina Jolie portrayed Afro-Cuban Mariane Pearl in brownface. Laurence Olivier and Anthony Hopkins played Black men in blackface. Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster, Dan Hedaya, Johnny Depp, Henry Silva, and Espera DeConti (who later changed his name to Iron Eyes Cody) all portrayed Native Americans. Katherine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Mickey Rooney, and Tilda Swinton have all portrayed Asians. Benedict Cumberbatch, Alec Guinness, Ben Kingsley, Peter Sellers and Ava Gardner have all portrayed Indians. So, why can’t Tom Laughlin, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, be a ‘half-breed’ from an unnamed tribe in the Southwest?
Billy Jack is a drive-in movie with spiritual pretensions. There’s nudity, improv, a song or two, the aforementioned ‘Indian’ flute, and a good bit of action mixed in with other mystic mumbo jumbo. It’s a movie that wears its plastic heart on its bloodied sleeve, pretending to stand for Native Americans when there are few in sight, ‘hippies’ when it’s unclear what that actually means, and peace while it prefers to hurt people. For many years, it was the most successful indie movie ever made, so I was not alone in my admiration. It was definitely an expression of the zeitgeist.
It was the year of my parent’s divorce and I wanted my father out of the house. I don’t have many memories of childhood in which he wasn’t a drunk. It’s not fear I remember, it’s impotence in the face of his violence. I wanted someone to do something definite. I wanted him to disappear. I wanted him dead. That’s the story I can tell about that moment and maybe it makes sense.
Vigilante films are about the individual taking control instead of relying on the integrity of a larger society; the peaceful man pushed to the breaking point, throwing off the yoke of his own helplessness. They bully for a personal code above all else, when they’re not simply engaging our Id in the pleasures of violence and revenge. On a good day, they can be an exploration of the individual finding their way amidst forces they don’t understand.
I wanted to believe in a film couched in the trappings of peace and compassion which simply comes down on the side of kicking the shit out of people. Billy Jack is a very American take on peace as passivity—the idea that peace is simply not doing anything, defined by negation, hiding, and avoidance. I wanted the peace and compassion, felt drawn toward it, but couldn’t hold the strength of my forming convictions and eventually succumbed, reveling in cathartic death when the bad guys get what’s coming to them.
I remember convincing my father to see Billy Jack with me. I know this happened, though the chronology doesn’t make sense. My parents were divorced by then and I wasn’t much older, so it must have been only a year or two after my first viewing. Ostensibly, I was showing him something important to me, but I wonder now if I was taunting him with a picture of, so I believed, a man who protected instead of threatened. I don’t remember his reaction.
My recent viewing of Billy Jack leaves me with the lingering stickiness of anonymous bad sex—an idea that appeared acceptable, even enjoyable, in the lead-up, but uncomfortable in the execution. Later, I feel scummy and compromised, caught in the slow realization that the thrill isn’t worth the aftermath.
This isn’t guilt—I don’t feel guilty that I sort-of enjoyed it, or sort-of made the mistake. Yet, there’s the queasiness of being confronted with a sliver of self I’d rather not recognize; a decision that sits uncomfortably in the body like a bad meal. Perhaps Orson Welles felt the same queasiness when he had Charlton Heston play Touch of Evil’s Miguel Vargas in brownface.
I remember Billy Jack as inspirational and affirming. I carried the mythology of the lone warrior from childhood in the Sixties far into adulthood, from the rousing climaxes of Dirty Harry to the films of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I didn’t personally relate to these men as a child, I was too small and sickly, but I understood them as American icons. I see myself enamored—in the righteous thrill of justice at first, then simply acclimated to the masturbatory act of carnage, the homoerotic orgasm that is the action film.
The stench of bad sex overlays America now. We misplace our sexuality in violence. We exorcise our demons, not by confronting them, but by confronting others. We have our first full-on vigilante President and suddenly we understand that the vigilante is always psychotic and murderous, with no interest in justice or protecting the weak. His only interest is always control. Roger Ebert was unconsciously prescient when he wrote, in his review of Billy Jack: “Is our only hope that the good fascists defeat the bad fascists?”
My father might have known or understood these things, watching the film in the theater beside me, but I wouldn’t know. He was of his generation and never spoke. The men around me never spoke. They never appeared to have feelings and, apparently, rarely had thoughts. They knew what was right, though, and rarely hesitated to tell you so. They had grown up with Gary Cooper and John Wayne. I didn’t like any of the things I saw about being a man in my father. Maybe, he didn’t like them either. The only things he passed to me were a mute stoicism and alcohol.
Identity is never one narrative. It’s a series of contradictions we attempt to hold in a splitting sack that was too small to start with. So, my body holds a different story. At twelve, I didn’t trust men—and I was supposed to become one. I needed something other than the thrill of male catharsis. It was a cultural marker I couldn’t believe in, even as it overwhelmed me.
I often drop the contradictions of my past in the service of a smooth narrative, but the contradictions and the friction in their clash, make me who I am. It’s not the polished story I tell about myself, as much as I may wish it to be. Contradiction is the driver of childhood, a time when everything is in conflict and nothing is decided, and these conflicts don’t necessarily get resolved as we grow older. They’re only set aside for a time.
I knew I wasn’t built to be the hero—I was the collateral damage; the sidekick struggling to find a non-violent solution gunned down by the villain ten minutes before the end of the film to sweeten our hero’s revenge. I could see the kind of man I was supposed to be, and I understood the kind I was becoming. There was a gulf between the two my world told me nothing about.
It was twenty years before I found men I could trust, and the finding wasn’t a time of confrontation and epiphany. Instead, it was quiet and gently relentless, the way the acceptance of trust often unfolds. I was living in a community where there was always building, weeding, tending cows. Men could talk, or not, as we worked but when we did, we often talked about what was important to us. I never had to hear about their conquests, or the fights they’d won, or the size of their dicks.
I’m weeding a fence-line with a loud machine, a fence-line in an out-of-the-way place, when a friend drives up in his truck. He stops, gets out, opens a cooler in the bed and withdraws two beers. I’m hot, sticky, covered in grass and so is he. We stand beside the truck looking over the mown field into the trees in the distance, and drink. I don’t remember whether we said a word.
I left my father behind by finding something of my own, by stepping into a world he didn’t invent. And couldn’t have entered. This isn’t the perverse passivity of ‘peace’ in the movies—an inaction which requires oversight from a male with fists and guns to survive, but a different kind of activity altogether. It’s an act of creation.
Billy sacrifices his preferred ‘noble death’ at the hands of the police, allowing himself to be taken into custody in order to ‘get the story out.’ His life, he has come to see, has been made bigger through violence—it is no longer his own—and its very size can now be hefted in the service of whatever it is he thinks he’s fighting for. Driven from the scene in the back of a squad car, the country road is lined with people who raise their fist in solidarity to a cause that is never made clear through the entirety of the film.
And that was when I cried. In profound understanding. In solidarity. In the confidence that Billy would be redeemed, proven right. White suffering in American movies is always a short-term thing; the aggrieved white person will rise to the occasion or be rescued, redeemed. Or, they’ll make the choice to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, like Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure.
Billy Jack allowed me to play both sides: to stand for peace and justice while enjoying death and destruction, to stake my claim to a moral superiority that was amorphous, nondescript, and risk-free. To decry evil while reveling in the chaos it brings. To see human rights, civil rights, environmental rights, as a dance enacted by white people with other white people.
I cried because it seemed true. At twelve, America told me it was true, and I believed. I knew that the ‘half-breed Indian’ played by the white man would be lionized, as he is in subsequent films. (I’ve never seen them, by the way. By the time they were released, I had thankfully moved on.). It’s the covenant of American film.
And, now. Now.
We continue to believe in our white saviors. Robert Mueller. Adam Schiff. Chris Wallace. Joe Biden. We believe, even as we revel in the chaos. This is what we’ve learned from the vigilante film, which is simply a variation on a theme of capitalism. And, even if our saviors aren’t psychotic and sociopathic, we will place them in a position where they will become so. Because that, that is what a savior is.
Steve Mitchell’s work has been published in december magazine, The Southeast Review, storySouth, The North Carolina Literary Review, Red Fez, and Contrary, among others. His debut novel, Cloud Diary, was published by C&R Press in May 2018. His short story collection, The Naming of Ghosts, is available from Press 53. He’s a winner of the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, judged by Lily King, and the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize. Steve has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. He’s co-owner of Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, NC.
