Pilgrim's progress

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

(1962)

In an episode of Mad Men I watched this week, one character tells another of having seen this and having been disappointed that in the end, it turns out just as you thought at first: "John Wayne shot him." Well, yeah, that's the obvious reading, but I read this as a protopostmodernist document that yields no certainty.

The first, ostensibly objective, depiction we get of the shooting seems to show James Stewart's Ranse Stoddard firing a fluky fatal shot; later Wayne's Tom Doniphon narrates a revisionist version wherein he gunned down Lee Marvin's memorable badman from the shadows in cold-blooded murder.

But Doniphon has at least two motives, one self-aggrandizing, one self-effacing, for undercutting Ranse's narrative: he may just want to sting one last time the man to whom he has lost his one true love, Hallie (Vera Miles), or, more likely, he may want to assuage Stoddard's legitimate guilt in the service of sending the territory's best man to Washington. Or he may be telling the truth. Or he may erroneously think he's telling the truth: even in Doniphon's version, Ranse's shot seems sufficiently well aimed to have had at least a chance of providing the fatal wound. And conveniently, the drunken doctor/coroner has no interest in investigating the shooting beyond declaring the outlaw dead.

I think the whole point--and the point of the newspaper editor's portentous summation "When the truth becomes the legend, print the legend," which, if you actually parse it, means precisely nothing--is that fact is often too slippery to pin down. That's not news in 2009, but in the 1962 Hollywood mainstream, it was far hipper than John Ford is usually given credit for being.