Liberty Versus ‘The Experts’ in Film and TV

 by Ryan McMaken

...Cantor, an expert on Shakespeare and a professor of English at the University of Virginia, has again returned to the topic of television and film with his new book The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV, and further expands on the topics of globalization, markets, and state power first presented in his 2001 book Gilligan Unbound. 
 
This new volume is even more substantial than the previous one, featuring ten essays on film and television ranging from UFO movies to Westerns to South Park. In addition, the introduction provides an extensive discussion on the very nature of pop culture, how it is produced, and how it should be interpreted...

Cantor begins with The Searchers (1956) and looks at its themes of revenge in light of another revenge cycle, Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In the frontier of the Western genre, the lawlessness of the new lands is reflected in the words of Aeschylus, written millennia before:

Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out, where Justice and bloody slaughter are the same… castrations, wasted seed, young men’s glories butchered…

In the Western genre, this is so often the nature of the American frontier neatly summarized, and we can only ask ourselves: who shall impose order? 


Cantor goes on to note that this question is answered in a variety of ways in Westerns, with two distinct and opposing options offered by the television shows Have Gun – Will Travel (1957-1963) and Deadwood (2004-2006). 

Have Gun provides the (conventional and authoritarian) view offered by Westerns, and as Cantor notes, the show’s hero Paladin imposes order on a frontier composed largely of racist rubes, petty tyrants and superstitious fools. Every town, it seems, has a lynch mob, and the "unending sequence of tyrannical rich men" in Have Gun sets the stage for many showdowns between the enlightened and refined hero Paladin and his backward enemies. 

Paladin, Cantor notes, looks remarkably like the members of the ruling class in Washington D.C. and New York at the time Have Gun was made. Sophisticated, highly educated technocrats were the heroes of the day (at least among people making television shows) and Paladin fit the bill. Everywhere on the frontier, Paladin’s intervention is necessary for "Paladin never seems to come upon a functioning community, with a set of decent political institutions that make it capable of self-government." 


At the other end of the spectrum is the HBO series Deadwood, in which the people of the town of Deadwood are perfectly capable of self-government. If the "enlightened" people show up in Deadwood, it’s usually to steal something. 

Cantor examines Deadwood in light of the debate between Hobbes and Locke. Cantor concludes that Deadwood is in many ways explicitly libertarian, condemning government and praising private property as a civilizing force in numerous ways. Is the state necessary for order or do property, peace and prosperity pre-date the state? Deadwood, it seems, comes down firmly in the latter camp.


The people of Deadwood – uneducated, foul-mouthed, and unsophisticated – explicitly reject rule by far away and refined elites. They’ll take freedom instead. 

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