Hollywood Does Cash...Right and Wrong

Rating: 6/10 (4 March 2006)

Walking the Fine Line between Clever and Stupid By Jayson Harsin
From "the Man in Black," 1971: Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on.
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, But is there because he's a victim of the times.
I wear the black for those who never read, Or listened to the words that Jesus said, About the road to happiness through love and charity, Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me.
Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose, In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes, But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back, Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.
Thumbs up and down. I was thoroughly entertained by Walk the Line, James Mangold's attempt to be the first cinematic commentary on the recently deceased Johnny Cash. The acting and singing were superb. T. Bone Burnett's musical production is often mesmerizing. But the narrative arc attracts criticism, particularly the reduction of Cash's life to a quest for June Carter and a kind of Oedipal Complex with his father.
Multiple melodramatic devices humanize the legend by making him insecure as a boy and a man. But these devices are captive to a kind of Hollywood love story. The choice to focus on Cash's early life is highly reductive and typical of Hollywood screen formulas. In this story, two major forces seem to propel Cash's early life: a love quest for June Carter, the starlet of royal country ilk, and an Oedipal drive to conquer his father. Both drives are located in his early life. In a sense, this narrative choice makes the film a narrow psychological study.
Cash is marked by his humble cotton-picking origins, a harsh father, a close and protective older brother, and his love of early country on the radio, where his love for June Carter begins. The early loss of his brother leaves Cash forever struggling with the trauma of losing his best friend and paternal love. The hardworking but emotionally icy father is resentful that God took his eldest and "best son." "You took the wrong son," he cries in a poignant scene that forever marks young Johnny's future. A refrain that runs through the film is "You look like you're going' to a funeral [,John]." And Cash's response, "Maybe I am" is traced to this original event: his brother's death/funeral. Cash is forever going to his brother's funeral.
The other major force propelling Cash's life is his love for June Carter. As children, he and his brother hear the girl's beautiful voice as she sings on the radio with her famous family. There the seed of love is planted. Much of the rest of the film suggests Cash's aimless mistakes in career and marriage are a hapless wandering until he finds his fated soul mate and true love, June Carter. It bears some fairytale trappings, since when Cash gets the girl his problems appear to disappear, few as they are in the film--namely, drugs, insecurity, and oedipal hate towards his father. In Hollywood, apparently, all you need is love.
Different viewers will have other things to object to in this portrayal. Historical material of a docu-drama always invites comparisons to "the real thing" and accusations of infidelity to the real. While Cash is hardly portrayed as an angel, his first wife is portrayed as a 1950s uni-dimensional housewife, desiring all the dreamy accoutrements of upward mobility, ever wistfully searching for that irrecoverable Tupperware party. After weakly opposing Cash's dream to live by the sweat of his guitar, she figures out that what she really wants is a family man and the attention that any kind of spouse deserves. The story may not encourage complete sympathy with Cash in his family relations, but as hero of the film, Cash's familial misdemeanors are easily overlooked and his wife is potentially transformed into a shrewish, jealous bore. June Carter, on the other hand, is portrayed as a strong woman, caring yet determined, and able to reconcile her own choices with the judgments of others.
Reducing Cash's life to these two major forces, father and love, can be seen as the cost of generic constraints on mass-circulated films with big stars and budgets. Here one should return to Cash's "Man in Black" lyrics, written in 1971. Cash was not a Lee Greenwood; his was a different kind of country music, not easily appropriated by the Republican noise machine. Though he had only had brief stints in jail, he had drug and other problems and identified with those who had transgressed and been punished or who had the misfortune of growing up in cotton fields and without resources many take for granted. The film ends in 1968, and we get an on-screen script that reduces the final 35 years of Cash's life to a footnote: "June and Johnny lived happily ever after." Ah, the pleasure of fairy tale closure. Is that all there was to the Man in Black? No, but that's all this narrative has time for. What would Johnny say?
Jayson Harsin February 21, 2006 (slightly longer version at www.pearlsbee4swine.blogspot.com