Jack gets down off Whiskey and cuts the three strands of wire with a pair of cutters he evidently keeps handy in his saddle bag. In the next scene, Jack and Whiskey come to a barb-wire fence and a sign that reads "closed area." Fences become the subject of a forthcoming conversation between Jack and Jerri Bondi (played by Gena Rowlands), the wife of Jack's best friend. Jack unhobbles the mare, jumps on her back, and rides her quick and hard to get the friskiness out of her as the film credits role across the scene. Ultimately, however, the horse and the cowboy are one, both a bit spooky. The saddling-up scene involves the comic and rebellious cunning of the horse pitched against the authority of the master. We have a brief Eden scene in reverse as Jack offers the apple to his three-year-old mare, the equivalent of a woman companion. The cowboy here again is the lone American Adam. Jack pulls an apple out of his saddle bag, takes a bite and then tempts his horse. The tension between the modern military hero and the frontier cowboy hero will later become a theme in Disney's Toy Story, where different images of American heroes collide, yet must eventually cooperate, in order to protect the "Good Society" in an era of cultural change. The "setting" establishes the cowboy's uneasy position in a changing world the frontier and its representations are becoming nostalgic. Jack exhales and contemplates the encroaching modern world (or at least he appears to) and then turns to his horse, Whiskey, standing beside him. ![]() The open desert with the horse and rider and the open sky with the jet fighters are in contrast to one another and act as a epigraph to the tragic drama about to be played out in the film. Jack sits up, tilts his hat back and looks at the sky three jets make vapor trails across the clear, open air. At the same moment we hear jets overhead, and it seems that we are caught between two different eras of American history. ![]() A campfire and an open can of beans, then back to the right along the reclining, napping cowboy, Jack Burns, his face half-hidden under a cowboy hat. The Opening Shot: the camera pans down and to the left. Without tragedy, we forget the inevitable necessity of defeat. As myth, the courageous cowboy, again and again, rides off into the sunset as more "civilized" folks move into the land he domesticated with a six-gun. To this end, tragedy contains two salient elements: courage (defined by the ability to act violently) and the inevitable necessity of defeat. When we witness tragedy we acquire as one's own a reflexive mood, not only about the limits on freedom but about the power of stories to shape our attitudes and opinions. ![]() The cowboy epitomizes American individualism, Emerson self-reliance, and a connection to nature yet the film conveys a sense of loss as it plays out the conflict between social constraint and individual freedom as tragedy. Lonely Are the Brave is a successful adaptation of Edward Abbey's novel The Brave Cowboy, a cult classic which underscores the tension between the old and new world. In David Miller's film, western values, characterized by the myth of self, run up against the forces of law and order, the myth of state, inevitable and necessary, yet a misfire of the American dream. In Lonely Are the Brave, the opening shot demonstrates a thesis offered by Jane Tompkins in her essay "Language and Landscape." The stark, arid landscape puts "a whole set of values in place before a single word is spoken." The land is full of promise and yet calls for a certain kind of hero, a man as rugged as the land itself.
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