'He gave me some money but I think I lost it' #2

In the Valley of Elah: 2007, Warner Bros.


This is part of a longer thunky-think about three US films that came out in the same year: In the Valley of Elah, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. My last post was a little intro; this time it's a fairly hefty digression on In the Valley of Elah. The intro is here; to cut to the chase, in essence I think these three films all engage with an overlapping set of archetypal figures and patterns and each constellates them slightly differently; between the three there's not only therefore an interesting compare-and-contrast but a composite or collage picture of what it might feel like to be an American man right now (at least, the kind of maerican man who works in the movie industry...).


The plot


INTVOE follows retired military cop Hank Deerfield (played by Tommy Lee Jones) as he tries to uncover the truth of his son’s disappearance and violent death near his military base in New Mexico. Having followed Hank into the military, Mike had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. Hank’s personal code of honour is closely bound to the military and its meanings, and thereby to the national identity itself; in the course of the film he, and we, are challenged to consider whether those beliefs were misplaced from the beginning, or whether they have been betrayed by the nation they have both served – indeed that all three have served, as Hank’s other son, Mike’s brother, was killed in action before the action of the movie takes place. Hank’s investigation is assisted by Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) a civilian cop fighting misogyny at work and raising her son alone.

Archetypal themes

Violence and the warrior

The narrative and experience of both father and son is seen from the father’s perspective. Hank and his sons, in their devotion to their military careers, are taking on the role of channel and agent for the containment and use of violence as a means to ensure moral order and national selfhood. Violence is an intrinsic element of the human condition and necessary function of the state (already there is therefore a parallel between the character of the individual and that of the nation); the army is one of the means by which it is used and contained so as to limit the damage to, and serve the interests of, the wider group. This vocation is underpinned for Hank by a belief system that honours and values physical hardship, emotional control, personal integrity and an ethic of service (discipline and obedience), and these are the qualities in which he grounds a highly valued ideal of masculine identity. The Warrior archetype is a rich and familiar one, often associated with high ideals and crusades – and the shadow side that goes with them, often connected to the cause the Warrior serves. This is the ideal Hank instils in his sons, the baggage they inherit from him – Mike literally uses his father’s kitbag instead of his new Army issue bag when he goes on active service.

Law and order

The violence Hank encounters in the film is shocking to him, directed as it is not against enemy combatants (legitimate targets for organised violence within the law) but civilians and fellow soldiers; violence perpetrated by and upon the son(s). This is violence without moral meaning to him, transgressive of the values that made acceptable the existence of the military and indeed made its men models of masculine honour -warriors rather than terrorists. The transgression comes not from outside the system, however; it is in following orders on active duty that transgression is initially committed. This corruption can’t be contained, whatever the leaders of the nation believe. The lawlessness of the lawful system cannot then be confined to land across the border and enacted only upon the Other; it is brought home, to New Mexico, and enacted in American towns by American boys against each other. If the system becomes morally corrupted, in other words, it also ceases to operate effectively as a system. What is the difference between the violence Hank’s beliefs permit and that he rejects? Possibly a central conviction of the value of human life and the equal value of all lives; if we train young men to regard some lives as worthless, or at least worth less than their own, how can we prevent them exercising that judgement for themselves instead of solely as directed by the state?

It is not, I think, that the corruption of the individual in this film symbolises the corruption of the nation, or vice versa; nor is there a causal link being exposed. As in the other films, these are archetypal principles that play out in the internal world of the individual in parallel process with the life of the state, literalised both in the forms of national institutions and in individual behaviours.

Christian archetypes

For Hank this is not only a personal crisis (what has the father perpetrated on his sons?) but a crisis of faith in the American ideal: troops in Iraq are following the orders of the state they serve, and it is the loss of that state’s moral compass that makes them both criminals free of any moral code and victims of a loss of honour and humanity. The Warrior fights for a cause, and if that cause is corrupted so is the Warrior’s identity. And there is a specific religious character to the expression of these archetypal forms: Hank’s personal founding narrative is the struggle of David and Goliath, honourable combat (for Middle Eastern territory, appropriately enough) in which ingenuity and moral character can defeat brute strength and the forces of destruction.

To the viewer, of course, it seems perverse to for him to identify with David when the US is the globe’s Goliath. We are supposed to notice this and also at the same to recognise that Hank Deerfield is a David struggling with the unresponsive horror of the US military Goliath. But perhaps the Old Testament narrative we are also involved in is of Abraham and Isaac: another story of violence between strong and weak in which God has taken sides and which is personalised to fathers and sons. For Hank and Mike Deerfield the voice of God has not been heard in time and the slaughter of the son is committed. This is the guilt crisis of fathers who send their sons to war and it is an acute challenge about the relationship between violence and righteousness for a nation at war.

The explicit Christian character of these archetypal themes expands and deepens their resonance: not only do the Old Testament texts provide mythic fathers and sons and warriors to set against the characters in the film but it provides the fathers with a Father. In a famous dream interpretation, Jung drew a parallel between the relationship with the personal father and the relationship with God; the former is the literalisation of a spiritual reality articulated by the latter. With this in mind Hank is struggling with himself as a father, with his nation, with his faith and with his sense of self as he negotiates the distance between his beliefs, his actions and the reality in the course of the film.

The Other and the Self

Here as in the other films there is an anxiety about the idea of national borders, about the exclusion of disruption and difference, protecting an internal order and meaning that is figurative as well as literal. Moral corruption is enacted in Iraq but then more worryingly at home; illegitimate violence is initially directed ‘safely’ towards Iraqis but then escapes control and makes victims of fellow Americans; violence is enacted towards others apparently without consequence but then helplessly enacted upon the self, in suicide; violence is a job done outside the family that nonetheless ultimately destroys it. The Other is, then, the foreigner at whom violence can legitimately and illegitimately be directed and abroad is the space in which it can be exercised (warfare is prosecuted on foreign soil). But the foreigner is also the reflector of American values and agent of self realisation, perhaps particularly in the figure of the immigrant raising the American flag who appears at the beginning and end of the film and the belief that aggression can be kept ‘outside’ is one of the central falsities exposed in the film.

Women and mothers…

There are more women in this film than the other two. Emily Sanders is, like Hank, an agent of order, enforcing the law – in parallel with Hank’s uncovering of the corruption of the masculine/warrior/national idea of morally ordered violence and progress, Sanders’ femaleness troubles the proximate masculine system of policing and justice. She is ostracised by her colleagues not only for being a woman but for being a woman with a sex life; she is given cases of missing and errant dogs to deal with because she can’t or shouldn’t be a law enforcer. What is it that is so dangerous about making this vocation woman’s work? It is partly a problem of identity theft: if she can be like that, how can I define myself as different? But it is also possibly to do with knowing too much: like Tiresias she knows both the masculine system of control (men controlling the violence of other men) and also the feminine space that is created as the sphere to be protected from this system. She is supposed to be what men go home to in order to escape themselves and to give their activities meaning, in other words; by intruding into the masculine system she troubles the distinction between perpetrator and victim, protector and protected. This is referenced in the case of the woman who comes to the police for help, is turned away and becomes the victim of domestic violence. Sanders was acting too much in the masculine system when she rejected the woman and not enough with women’s knowledge. It’s worth noting that, unusually, Sanders is seen to experience violence in the course of her duties as the men do, underlining the questions the film raises about the relationship between and law- and nation-making, and what the introduction of women into that system enables and problematises.

There is also an interesting comparison to be made between Sanders and Joan Deerfield (Susan Sarandon), who represents that more conventionally feminine domestic sphere and expresses to us the effects within it of the system Hank and his sons have served and upheld. The mother of two dead sons, excluded from the reasoning and prosecution of their vocation, she takes and age-old and archetypal position of the grieving mother, a figure largely denied by Hank’s (presumably) Protestant Christianity but nonetheless unexcludable from cultural expression. When moral order is in effect, she stands for what is being protected: internal (domestic) comfort and peace, a safe lack of agency. When that order is disrupted she is the powerless victim and helpless rebel:

[Hank and Joan on the phone]

Hank: Mike was the one who wanted to join, I sure as hell didn’t encourage it!

Joan: Like he could ever have felt like a man if he hadn’t gone. Both my boys, Hank. You could have left me one.

Hank: Joan? Joan, please. Joan, I can’t listen to you cry.

Joan: Then don’t.

[hangs up]

In a different manner than Emily Sanders, therefore, she exposes the myth of a masculine identity founded on the separation from and protection of women and could be read politically as a statement against the denial of the feminine by the masculine – the now-conventional assertion, in other words, that the exclusion and domination of women culturally and politically correlates directly to levels of violence and warfare and that this can apply also to the individual, that a man must be in touch with his ‘feminine side’ to be a balanced human being. Whether and how a woman should be more in touch with her ‘masculine side’ is in general less often and less clearly discussed, which is why there is perhaps a cathartic relief in seeing Charlize Theron not only get punched in the face but then get up afterwards and get on with her work.

…And men and fathers

It also the women in the film that enable us to see Hank as a father, not only in the conversation with Joan above but in his interaction with Sanders’ son David and his telling of David and Goliath, which he concludes as follows:

Hank: First thing David had to fight was his own fear. He beat that, he beat Goliath. Cause when Goliath charged, David just planted his feet, took aim, and waited. You know how much nerve that took? A few more steps and Goliath would have crushed him. And the he threw the rock. That’s how you fight monsters. Lure ‘em close to you, look ‘em in the eye and smack ‘em down.

David: You fight a lot of monsters?

Hank: Sure

David: You win?

Hank: If I didn’t, I would have been crushed, right?

David sees the logic, nods.

Hank: Ok then. You go to sleep.

They’re good principles to teach a child: managing your own fear, being sure of your own convictions and using honour even in aggression. No wonder that after that, David feels able to have his bedroom door closed and the room in darkness. At least for a few minutes, until he asks his mother to open it again, just not so much as usual. It’s a small and humorous scene that shows the truth of the partiality of the conventional fathering perspective – and to some extent the partiality of the mother’s view too.

It also prompts us to consider the Law of the Father in a text that is so concerned with the role of the father in imposing systems, and the function of those systems in determining male identity. The psychoanalytic notion of the Law of father expresses the role of the Father (often but not always the personal father) in prohibiting the infant’s desire for the Mother. The Law of the Father is then in more general terms to with the repression and redirection of desire and the necessary separation from the Mother as part of the infant’s development. Hank’s masculine ideal demands a rigorous separation between mother and child that, too late, he and Joan are forced to regret.

Next time: No Country for Old Men (2007, Miramax/Paramount)