So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and wild-cat banking.
Here Dunson represents both the positive and negative possibility of "individual liberty" that Turner writes about.
2. Economics is about "value, money, scarcity...labor"--all at the heart of Red River. This is a film that makes economic history American history--and suggests that both are worthy of near-biblical reverence. While some Westerns, like Stagecoach (and Once Upon a Time in West, Devil's Doorway, The Man from Laramie), critique great accumulations of capital, Red River rewards the hero with wealth.
[Quotation from Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, The New Economic Criticism, 38]
3. More than just about frontier economies, however, the film draws together several theatres of evaluation (to paraphrase a line by economic theorist J.-J. Goux)--arenas in which the value of commodities, masculinity, work, violence, political organization, etc. are tested and evaluated against competing models. E. g. what are cattle worth in and out of Texas? What model of masculinity succeeds in Texas and which in Kansas? Where is violence appropriate and where does it "cost too much"? What kind of political structure works best in each place--the autocrat or the democrat?
4. Historian Ferdinand Braudel observed that “any society based on an ancient structure which opens its doors to money sooner or alter loses its acquired equilibria and liberates forces that can never afterwards be adequately controlled” (437).
Perhaps the comment that Dunson "doesn't know what to fight" refers to the challenges of the traditional patriarch in a new economy based on cash rather than barter in commodities and the "liberation" of a new kind of masculinity.
[Quotation from Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, The New Economic Criticism, 38]
3. More than just about frontier economies, however, the film draws together several theatres of evaluation (to paraphrase a line by economic theorist J.-J. Goux)--arenas in which the value of commodities, masculinity, work, violence, political organization, etc. are tested and evaluated against competing models. E. g. what are cattle worth in and out of Texas? What model of masculinity succeeds in Texas and which in Kansas? Where is violence appropriate and where does it "cost too much"? What kind of political structure works best in each place--the autocrat or the democrat?
4. Historian Ferdinand Braudel observed that “any society based on an ancient structure which opens its doors to money sooner or alter loses its acquired equilibria and liberates forces that can never afterwards be adequately controlled” (437).
Perhaps the comment that Dunson "doesn't know what to fight" refers to the challenges of the traditional patriarch in a new economy based on cash rather than barter in commodities and the "liberation" of a new kind of masculinity.
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