INTRODUCTION
In 1936 John Ford told Emanuel Eisenberg, “there's a new kind of public that wants more honest pictures.”Footnote 1 For this “new kind of public” Ford produced a series of films that sometimes transcended the usual liberal platitudes found in filmmakers like Frank Capra, occasionally offering fundamental challenges to Western imperialism and class inequality.Footnote 2The Hurricane (1937) represents a particularly interesting product from this period, since it stages the dialectic of colonized desire and the emergence of a decolonizing “national” consciousness, cinematically anticipating several central themes from Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. At the same time, while Ford and his screenwriter Dudley Nichols offered an attack upon (colonial) whiteness that had few parallels in New Deal cinema, that anticolonial critique displaced and repressed any cinematic discussion of white supremacy within the United States. The mechanism of that displacement and repression was an orientalism that depicted exotic South Pacific “primitives” with an irrepressible and savage “love of freedom,” while, in other pictures made during the same period, Nichols and Ford represented African American “primitives” with a childlike dependence that required constant shepherding.Footnote 3
My primary purpose in this essay is the “textual” or semiotic analysis of the critique of colonialism offered by The Hurricane. This is decidedly not a biographical study of John Ford. Nor is it possible, in the space of this essay, to fully elucidate or explain Ford's often seemingly mercurial politics. Nonetheless, by way of introduction, I will offer some reflections upon the film's historical context and its relation to Ford's own life in order to explore some possible sources behind one of the most vivid depictions of the colonized consciousness offered by New Deal-era cinema. Certainly, part of the reason Ford made the film was for the paycheck. But Joseph McBride's claim in his thoughtful biography of Ford that the film was “approached by the director with only the most superficial level of personal involvement” seems to be at odds with the film's political content. True, The Hurricane “bolstered Ford's tenuous standing at the box office,”Footnote 4 but as with Fort Apache (1948), The Searchers (1956), and some of Ford's other successful “genre” pictures, one of the director's gifts was his ability to use genre forms to express mythic themes that intersected with his personal history.Footnote 5
Ford worked with a number of screenwriters during the 1930s and 1940s. But, at least through 1948, he had a special relationship with the Irish American Popular Front screenwriter Dudley Nichols.Footnote 6 As Ford put it in his interview with Eisenberg for New Theater, “Combination of author and director running the works: that's the ideal. Like Dudley Nichols and me. Or Riskin and Capra.”Footnote 7 Between 1934 and 1948 the pair produced a series of pictures for an audience that demanded a new kind of socially relevant and politically engaged cinema. Although Ford and Nichols began working together in the early 1930s, their production of the unabashedly political Irish expressionist drama The Informer (1935) brought them both critical accolades and profits at the box office. While The Informer was a “serious” or “prestige” picture, as well as a labor of love for its director, Ford and Nichols would also occasionally draw upon their common cultural memory of Irish dispossession in order to transform typical genre pictures into political allegories made for the “new kind of public” emerging from the wake of the New Deal, Age of the CIO, and the Popular Front.Footnote 8
The Hurricane has received little critical attention. Beginning a decade after he completed that picture, in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Ford made a number of his best-known and best-studied genre pictures, films that often seemed to capture the Cold War anxieties of the American filmgoing public and expressed Ford's own complicated relationship with nationalism and American democracy. His cavalry trilogy (Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950)) represents a case in point. As Richard Slotkin argues in Gunfighter Nation,
Those films treat the Rio Grande as a fixed and perilous border, the home or refuge of red savages whose raids threaten the safety, even the existence, of American society. In Fort Apache the river is the figurative Elbe, across which enemies can still negotiate (as Soviets and Americans could before 1948). In Rio Grande the river is a Yalu or Iron Curtain, which can only be crossed in arms for battles or rescue and/or annihilation.Footnote 9
Through his cinema, Ford helped forge an imaginary vision of the communist threat, and offered a militarized nationalism that sometimes surrendered democracy in exchange for security.
At the same time, what makes many of these films so interesting to contemporary scholars is the fact that Ford's anticommunism was always tinged with a visible ambivalence. This ambivalence appears, for instance, in the remarkably odd ending of Fort Apache, where Colonel York consciously falsifies history in order to preserve the legend of Colonel Thursday and thus the unity of his troop (and, by implication, of the nation itself). And this ambivalence played out in Ford's own life experience. Although an anticommunist, he never gave the kind of unquestioning support to the McCarthyite “crusades” offered by his friends Ward Bond and John Wayne. When, in 1950, the powerful director Cecil B. de Mille tried to push a loyalty oath upon the Screen Directors Guild (SDG), Ford resisted the attempt, saying, “We organized this guild to protect ourselves against producers … Now somebody wants to throw ourselves into a news service and an intelligence service and give out to producers what looks to me like a blacklist.”Footnote 10
A number of scholars have argued that Ford's Irish republicanism provided the director a framework through which he understood the political and social upheavals of the twentieth century. For instance, Joseph McBride endorses Thomas Flanagan's judgment that The Grapes of Wrath was among Ford's “most Irish” films. “The westward journey of the Joad family … to an uncertain future in California, where they are treated as little better than animals, powerfully echoes the experience of the Famine immigrants in coming to America.”Footnote 11 Further, when, in 1936, a United Press reporter spoke to Ford and a group of Hollywood screenwriters, the director contributed an ambulance for the Loyalist Medical Corps. Scott Eyman writes that “Ford's enthusiasm for the left-wing, anti-Franco forces was a simple transposition of a political situation near to his heart: Franco equaled England, while the Spanish Loyalists equaled the IRA.”Footnote 12 While Eyman's interpretation seems reasonable, there is nothing “simple” about this political “transposition.” The common arguments that Ford's 1930s politics were somehow inauthentic because he viewed the dispossession of the Oakies through the lens of the colonization of Ireland by the English, or that “his attraction to the Spanish Loyalists stemmed from his ability to generate an imaginative analogy that compared Franco's forces to British troops in Ireland and the Spanish Loyalists to the Irish Republican Army,” need to be recontextualized.Footnote 13 The fact that Ford's identification with Irish dispossession by British imperialism allowed him to generate such imaginative analogies, thus recasting his own past in relation to the political present, is precisely what needs to be emphasized. For at least a brief period of time, and especially in his collaborations with Dudley Nichols, John Ford's Irish American traditionalism may have helped provoke his cinematic depictions of social problems that occasionally verged into radical critique.
COLONIAL ORDER AND PACIFIC PASSIONS
In brief, The Hurricane tells the story of Terangi (Jon Hall), a Europeanized native who, after breaking the jaw of a white man, is unjustly imprisoned for six months. Because Terangi's wild heart cannot stand confinement, he continually attempts to escape his jailors, leading to a sixteen-year sentence. During his final escape, a hurricane destroys his home island, presumably as God's wrath for those injustices. In another director's and writer's hands, this film would probably have been an existential tale of dueling wills. But Ford and Nichols turn it into a story of two communities, both dominated by the unbending force of French colonial honor, embodied in the form of Governor De Laage (Raymond Massey). The theme of unjust imprisonment animated a number of Ford's films during the 1930s, most notably The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) and Stagecoach (1939), but while both those films contain intriguing political subtexts, neither addresses the question of imperialism and the colonized consciousness.
The Hurricane begins with a framing narrative. On a ship bound for a South Sea island, a young woman tourist stands beside an unshaven Dr. Kersaint.Footnote 14 “The South Sea islands,” she begins, “the last hiding place of beauty, and adventure.” Dr. Kersaint replies, “That's what all the travel folders say.” What follows is a flashback: ominous music plays and the scene of the wasted island dissolves into the past, the dunes now filled with palm trees and contented natives walking hand in hand. The ominous notes of the orchestra's horn section give way to melancholy violins and cellos evoking a vanished utopia. The camera pans along the coast: a small church, with the priest digging in its garden; native huts, fishing nets and hammocks hung from the palms; natives waist-deep in the water, readying their vessels for work; children diving beside the docks and playing. Another dissolve: trumpets blowing martial music, a shot of the French flag waving in the wind. Then the camera takes us into an administrative office, with the governor seated behind a desk; a native, bare chest covered only by a garland of flowers, stands before him. “You've stolen a canoe,” says Governor De Laage, with trumpets amplifying his dark verdict. “You must pay the penalty for breaking the law. You are sentenced to thirty days' punishment.”
The music and cinematography anticipate the narrative trajectory of the entire picture. Two communities stand against one another. On the one hand, the natives in their paradise, and here the Church and the priest are clearly marked as a part of the paradise that French law will disrupt and, ultimately, destroy. The shot of the French tricolor billowing in the wind to the martial trumpet march marks the governor and his minions as colonial intruders. Ford and Nichols imply that colonialism represents a specifically European malady, thereby distancing America – and their American audience – from the critique they will offer. And the first lines uttered (after the initial framing narrative) identify Governor De Laage as the embodiment of the law. In fact, when the governor first speaks, the same trumpet theme that played over the tricolor plays again. Through music, governor and the flag are metonymically bound to one another. He is almost literally wrapped in his country's colors.Footnote 15
What follows is a piece of dialogue worth noting in full because it anticipates and shapes the subsequent narrative. De Laage says to his native prisoner, “when you have finished those thirty days, you will know better than to break the law again.” The native responds in his own tongue and De Laage says to his colonized collaborator, Chief Mehavre (Al Kikume), “I'm sorry, but I don't understand what he's saying.” Before the Chief can translate, Dr. Kersaint, invisible until now, speaks up: “He's defending himself against the power of the French government, and very ably.” “Does he deny the theft?” asks De Laage. “No. He offers in rebuttal that there was moonlight, an awful lot of it. And his lady love says she saw a gold fish in the sea.” A shot of the native's “lady love” sitting at his feet serves to signify the sexual abandon of these wild primitives; whereas De Laage, the representative of colonial order, stands against sentiment, sexuality, and desire.
“My dear doctor, I am as sensitive to the whims of love as the next man. But as governor of these islands, I cannot afford to sit by admiring the quaint and the curious. Thirty days, my good fellow.”
“It's not exactly my business, De Laage. You've only been here a year; whereas I, indolent wretch, have spent a pitifully long time in these islands. I know these people … You'll [destroy] yourself if you try to govern these somewhat childish people according to your ideas instead of theirs.”
This exchange places the film squarely in a long tradition of Western representation that figures the colonized as the seat of passion and the colonizers as the forces of order and restraint. Dr. Kersaint stands on the border between colonizer and colonized. He speaks their language, and according to his own admission, is an “indolent wretch.” While he does not fully indulge in the passions presented by the natives, he clearly lacks the restraint that holds De Laage's desires in check.
Precisely because of their childish ways (a typical orientalist justification for colonialism), the natives require Western guidance and improvement. But here Ford and Nichols offer a rather sly critique of colonial self-importance. As the film proceeds, the audience discovers that the “childish” characteristics of the natives are actually products of colonialism itself, and, by the end of the story, they achieve a “mature” national consciousness irretrievably opposed to their colonial conquerors. In this affirmation of subaltern autonomy, the natives become architects of a community that manages to shake off the manacles of Western colonial desire.
“I'M JUST THE SAME AS A WHITE MAN”
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon mobilizes his autobiographical experience of colonized consciousness to sketch the dialectic of colonized desire. The colonizers seize the “native” world, appropriate it, a dispossession that takes a semiotic as well as a physical form. “To speak a language,” he argues, “is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is.”Footnote 16 In fact, the colonized cannot resist the draw of whiteness. Whiteness represents power and honor. By seizing the native's world, by imposing Western values through the barrel of a gun, by annihilating the cultural originality of the colonized – and marking any residue as “savage,” “primitive” and “bestial” – the colonizers remake native desire. At the same time, the “fact of blackness” means that no matter how much “whiter” the colonized subject becomes, she or he will never be fully white, never fully human. Because of the fact of his blackness, Fanon found that “the white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation.”Footnote 17 This semiotic bond – between “whiteness” and colonial honor – figures prominently in The Hurricane.
At the end of the opening scene where Kersaint pleads the case of the nameless native canoe thief, the church bell rings, announcing the return of a ship that carries both Terangi and De Laage's beloved. As a last-ditch effort, Kersaint argues that the sentence should be commuted as a “homecoming gift” for Madame De Laage. De Laage responds, “I am ready to give my wife and my friends anything I own in the world, except my sense of honor and duty.” Throughout, the film fuses the concept of colonial honor with imperial injustice.
Terangi serves as the pivot for this representation. At the beginning of the film, his is the mind colonized by whiteness. Unlike the nameless native in the earlier scene, Terangi mastered the European language of his masters. Again Fanon:
Rather more than a year ago in Lyon … in a lecture I had drawn a parallel between Negro and European poetry, and a French acquaintance told me enthusiastically, “At bottom you are a white man.” The fact that I had been able to investigate so interesting a problem through the white man's language gave me honorary citizenship.Footnote 18
Terangi, too, believes that his mastery of French gives him an “honorary citizenship” in the white world. Furthermore, Terangi has a position of status as the first mate of a European ship, the Catapoa. It is precisely this position of honor within the white man's world that deceives Terangi.
Terangi has returned to the island to marry Chief Mehavre's daughter, Marama (Dorothy Lamour). On their wedding night, Marama has a prophetic dream and she begs Terangi not to leave. “What are you worried about, Marama … Where's my cap?” He looks into the mirror as he dons his uniform:
It's very funny what a difference a cap makes in the world, Marama. In Tahiti, when I wear this cap, everybody's my friend. You think I'm just Terangi, who used to swim with you when you were just a little fish. In Tahiti, when I sit down in the café with this cap on, I'm just the same as a white man.
Despite Marama's warnings, Terangi, armed with this signifier of his status as an honorary white man (his cap), and with his fluency in the colonizer's tongue, prepares for his voyage back to Tahiti. Marama stows away aboard the Catapoa. When the captain discovers her, he orders her back to the island. He says, “You have no reason to go to Tahiti.” She replies, “Oh yes, I buy a dress with a ribbon on.”
“And red shoes with high heels,” adds Terangi.
“And a hat with a feather on it and a petticoat,” says Marama.
“And a doll that dances,” says Terangi.
“Alright, alright, you stay on board,” says the Captain, “but we'll take Terangi's cap away from him … I can't have a first mate with a bride hanging around his neck. He'll be an ordinary sailor from now on.”
Like Terangi, Marama desires the symbolic accoutrements of white status. When the captain tells her she has no reason to go to Tahiti, he is, in a sense, correct: Marama has no use for a dress with ribbons, red shoes with high heels, or petticoats. Her usual attire is a native sari; her feet are always bare. She desires those things she does not “need” precisely because they signify the honorary whiteness that Terangi prizes. And when the Captain threatens to take away the symbolic emblem of Terangi's honorary citizenship, Marama returns home.
Entering the cabaret in Tahiti, Terangi and his shipmates are greeted by a woman singing, “I can't give you anything but love.” This is the only popular music present in the film. And it evokes the dialectic of colonized desire. While all the other actors speak English (represented as French), this song is performed in French, the only moment in the film where that language is heard. The English lyric is:
The happiness that Terangi pines for comes from his white colonizer's love, the love he thinks he has attained through his cap and fine words. But the fact of his “blackness” bars him from the white world. For Fanon, “the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims [to honorary whiteness].”Footnote 19 Terangi begins to discover his blackness in the cabaret. Recall, “with this cap on, I'm just the same as a white man.” But the burden of his blackness comes from the white colonizer's gaze.
Sitting at a table with other native shipmates, Terangi opens his present for Marama, a small doll with a grass skirt. He winds the doll, and as it gyrates, he and his comrades laugh and imitate the dancing. Quite literally, the colonized sailors embody the corporeal “historico-racial schema” imposed by their masters, wearing the “livery that the white man has sewed.”Footnote 20 A white man comes to their table, yelling “get up!” His companions jump from the table, but Terangi meets the white man's eyes with his own hard gaze. “Get up when a white man tells ya!” The colonizer slaps Terangi across the face. As the song ends, Terangi lays the man flat with a blow. Later, the Captain pleads Terangi's case to the governor: “I've spent eight hours … trying to find out why my first mate was sentenced to six months in jail, and for doing exactly as you or I would do under the same circumstances.” The Governor: “Your boy hits too hard.”
“The sentence is unjust … and you know it … You don't know the Manakoora natives. They're not like your Tahitians. They can't stand confinement … A mere matter of maintaining European prestige? A native mustn't raise his hand against a white man?”
Terangi “hit the wrong man,” says the governor, a man with “influence at home.” Despite the injustice of the sentence, an injustice repeatedly acknowledged by the colonial authorities, European honor and prestige, fueled by colonial corruption, demand satisfaction.
Terangi is imprisoned behind barbed wire, and labors like a slave for a white guard with a whip. As he works, Terangi watches his ship sail homeward. He jumps the fence and swims for the Catapoa. Although the other native sailors, and perhaps the captain, see their old mate's approach, they continue on. Terangi's first attempt to escape fails. Struggling back to the beach, he is swarmed and whipped by brutal guards. Through the lash, he begins to discovers his “blackness.”Footnote 21
TWO COMMUNITIES
Although in the footage that follows the audience sees various scenes of Terangi resisting his imprisonment, this is not the existential story of a man's survival, but of two communities, the tensions between and within them. Let me begin this section of my study with an investigation into the colonizers' community. Ford and Nichols mobilize a maternalist and quasi-Catholic symbolism to shape the narrative. Among the colonizers, there are two distinct positions, one represented by Governor De Laage, the other by three liminal figures: Dr. Kersaint, Father Paul (C. Aubrey Smith), and Madame De Laage (Mary Astor), who wears a prominent gold cross around her neck. Again, as with many of Ford's films, women represent the voice of sentimental reason, the voice of the heart, while Father Paul's sympathy for the natives demonstrates Ford's and Nichols's Catholic sensibilities, and it is worth noting that here Catholicism is rendered a symbol of social justice.
Before the Catapoa returns to the island, news has already spread of Terangi's imprisonment. Ford uses a series of close-ups focussed upon native faces in order to evoke their desolation and incipient anger. At a breakfast that includes Kersaint, Father Paul, and Madame De Laage, the captain asks Governor De Laage to intervene in Terangi's case. Kersaint adds that Terangi is the “best loved” of all the inhabitants of Manakoora, that this injustice will return to haunt the French colonial authorities. But De Laage refuses. To his companions:
I know you all mean well. But I am not the representative of well-meaning points of view. I represent a civilization that cannot afford to show confusion or conflict to the people it governs. The law has spoken in Tahiti. I must uphold that law.
His interest is in law, and more importantly in order, rather than in justice. Law sides with white oppression, while justice – and freedom – must be fought for by the natives themselves. Over and again, Ford and Nichols demonstrate the impotence of those colonial voices whose sympathy sides with the natives. The captain, Kersaint, Father Paul, and Madame De Laage are repeatedly shown to be powerless in the face of colonial rule: “Would it influence your sense of duty at all to know that Mrs. Terangi is about to be a mother?” asks Kersaint. Madame De Laage immediately responds, “That's wonderful … that puts everything in a different light, dear.” Then the Governor again: “No, that only puts me in a worse light. Now I'm not only Terangi's persecutor, I'm the oppressor of an unborn child.”
De Laage appears “in a worse light” not only from the perspective of the islanders, or simply from the perspective of the sympathetic colonists, but from the perspective of the cinematic audience itself. Throughout the rest of the picture, Ford and Nichols associate Marama with the Madonna, and mobilize the audience's revulsion against the oppression of innocents in order to accomplish their work of critique.
Plagued by guilt at her husband's intransigence, Madame De Laage brings Marama Terangi's doll and asks her to stay at the governor's mansion. But Marama, now transformed by melancholy, tells the woman to “go away … I don't go to your house.” Despite the white woman's sympathy, Marama begins to perceive the connection between whiteness and oppression. Framed within a deep-shadow close-up, tears in her eyes, Marama takes a defiant tone: “everybody will laugh at the jail that will try to hold Terangi.” As she breaks into tears, there is a close-up of the grass-skirted doll, dancing. Here the filmmakers introduce the beginnings of a decolonized national consciousness. Through Terangi's experience, mediated by the Madonna-like Marama, the natives will soon recognize white paternalism as colonial injustice and oppression.
“LOOK AT THEM DANCE. THERE'S THE ISLAND'S ANSWER TO YOUR LAW”
There then follow more scenes of brutality and violence directed against Terangi: guns shooting him down, white men with whips lashing him, sadistic captors laughing. But Terangi never speaks a word during these scenes. Whatever is happening in his mind, however his consciousness is being transformed by captivity, the audience never knows. Rather, the audience sees the transformation of native consciousness on Manakoora.
Kersaint and Madame De Laage continue to plead for Terangi, all without effect. During one such session, Chief Mahavre finally speaks his mind. Up to this point in the film, Mahavre has been the ideal colonial subject, subjugating his own people under the French flag. “Excellency,” he begins, still deferent and obedient, “the people on my island were all happy before. Now they are very unhappy. This is not good law, or good justice.” But De Laage simply takes another puff on his cigarette and ignores the chief's plea. With that puff, De Laage destroys the last breath of French colonial legitimacy. “There is no Terangi,” says De Laage, and “it is not a question of justice or injustice to a human being. It is a question of upholding the law under which these islands are governed.” What happens next reveals the maturation of an anticolonial consciousness.
Until now, the escapes had been relatively nonviolent. But upon this venture, Terangi kills one of his guards. This homicide is centrally significant because once the natives hear the news, they celebrate not only the escape of a national hero, but the death of white oppression. The music in the film changes from melancholy to ominous as De Laage and his wife, playing chess in their sitting room, hear native drums. They look to the village where they see scenes of excess – dancing, hooting, and Kersaint lost in the orgy of freedom. Marama sits beside the fire, the grass-skirted doll in her hand. That doll has been transformed from a sign of racial domination into a carnivalesque representation of native autonomy. As women dance before her, she holds the doll before each one, comparing them, and laughing at the insufficiency of western representations. Marama is not simply laughing for joy at Terangi's escape and his revenge upon the white guard; she laughs at her former desires for whiteness, now buried by a lust for freedom and a new consciousness as part of a nationalized, decolonizing people. The islanders are no longer simply what the white man had made them; through Terangi as a unifying symbol, they have broken the bonds imposed by the colonizer's gaze.
This scene of frenzy offers a revision of typical orientalist ideology. As Shohat and Stam argue, hegemonic colonialist “discourse operates between … two master tropes, alternately positing the colonized as blissfully ignorant, pure, and welcoming on the one hand, and on the other as uncontrollably wild, hysterical, and chaotic, requiring the disciplinary tutelage of the law.”Footnote 22 While not escaping the exoticizing and eroticizing tendencies of orientalist discourse, Ford and Nichols set this chaotic hysteria against the injustice of colonial administration. It is the sexualized love for liberty that breaks the bonds of white desire. True, subaltern sexuality is figured as dangerous. But to whom? Governor De Laage evinces a palpable terror at the natives' symbolic uprising. But the audience does not identify with De Laage and his community. Rather, the entire narrative demonstrates the corrupt character of imperial whiteness and colonial honor. Perhaps Ford and Nichols imagine the audience standing in the liminal position of Kersaint; yet Kersaint himself is no longer on the boundary. His alcoholic frenzy, his own wild gyrations, as well as his words, place him in the natives' camp.
When the governor appears, all fall silent, waiting. To Chief Mahavre he says, “what has given the people happiness?” To this point, Mahavre had dressed in the white man's colonial uniform, wearing a white jacket over his native garb. But now he is dressed wholly in native costume. He spits the word “Excellency” through his teeth like poison. “Terangi, Excellency … he has escaped, Excellency.” Even Mahavre has broken with the white man's world.
Slurring his words, Kersaint interjects, “is there any law against dancing and singing when the heart's happy?”
“Is he on this island, have you seen him?”
“You don't have to see him. He's a legend … He's the soul and symbol of all these good people … No cage can hold him. They're the last of the world's afflicted race of humans who believe in freedom. Look at them dance! There's the island's answer to your law.”
Again and again, Ford's cinema argues that “peoplehood” or community requires symbolic mediation.Footnote 23 At the end of The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad becomes the symbol of Casy's “one big soul.” Near the conclusion of Fort Apache, Thursday's ghostly image symbolizes a new multiethnic American community bound together by its opposition to those beyond the border. In The Hurricane, Terangi is the symbol of freedom and rebellion forging a new people. True, before Terangi, the islanders were a community, under the paternalistic protection of French authority. But now they have achieved a decolonized national consciousness. They have shaken off the shackles of white desire.
DECOLONIZED INDEPENDENCE AND ENSLAVED SERVILITY
In The Hurricane, Ford and Nichols associate “whiteness” with a corrupt political regime and a discourse of “honor” that represses social justice, sentiment, sexuality, and feeling. They evoke the genesis of a decolonizing national consciousness among the natives founded upon a fundamental rejection of European values and the forms of desire (for whiteness and status) imposed by a paternalistic European regime.
At the same time, they build this critique upon a kind of orientalist ideology that celebrates the wild (read savage) independence of the colonized people. And while The Hurricane bases its argument against colonial oppression on the wild love for freedom evinced by the natives, Judge Priest (1934) offers a conventionally racist depiction of African Americans as dependent, servile subjects, thereby justifying a white supremacist social order. From the first scene, with Stepin Fetchit as a lazy, eye-rolling, mumbling “negro,” to the last, where Judge Priest (Will Rogers) brings Yankee and Rebel veterans together in (white) racial harmony, the film unrolls racist imagery long familiar to American filmgoers. True, Rogers, Ford, and Nichols play with racial stereotypes; true, Ford himself seemed to believe the film provided an antiracist argument; but the evidence of the picture makes it very hard to accept Lary May's claim that Will Rogers's cinema escaped and challenged the limitations of American racial ideology.Footnote 24
The seeming conceptual discord between the critique of whiteness offered by The Hurricane and the overt white supremacy of Judge Priest is not necessarily surprising. As David Roediger points out, American racial ideology always treated its own colonial victims differently from the victims of its enslavement:
Even on a mythic level … Native Americans served poorly as foils against which whites could measure themselves as workers. Comparisons with Black slaves or even Northern “free” Blacks were tempting precisely because whites had defined these groups as servile … But the mythic/historical Native American male was seen as independent … Any systematic social construction of the white worker's position that used the Native American as the “other” would therefore have had to take people of color as a model rather than as a negative reference point.Footnote 25
Just as white settlers defined Native Americans as both fearful racial “others” and, simultaneously, as “independent,” so too Ford and Nichols take the colonized islanders as independent models for counterhegemonic community formation, rather than as negative reference points. Indeed, while Ford and Nichols represent Indians as fearful “others” in Stagecoach (1939), Ford's own cinematic and personal history shows evidence of a slow revision of his racial attitudes toward Native Americans. Beginning with Fort Apache (1948), much of his later cinema explicitly indicts the imperial conquest of Native Americans.Footnote 26 In a famous remark to Peter Bogdanovich, Ford argues that his “sympathy was always with the Indians,” comparing what he calls the “genocide” against Native Americans to the Black and Tan conquest of Ireland (and once more reading American history through his own Irish American lens).Footnote 27 Defining the Manakoora natives as unbreakably “independent,” the film unintentionally and passively preserves a Jim Crow white supremacy that allows for the disenfranchisement of African Americans precisely because of their “servility.” It is the projected independence of the islanders – and, later in Ford's work, of the Indians – that sets the projected servility of African Americans in relief.
“YOU'RE ALL GUILTY”
As the islanders become increasingly restive, the weather corresponds to their mood. For instance, the sequence detailing the celebration of Terangi's escape discussed above begins with a rapidly swirling weather vane set atop the governor's mansion. Ford and Nichols proceed through metonymy, connecting the elements to the increasingly elemental rage of the colonized population. Upon Terangi's final escape, a mighty wind begins to blow. Meanwhile, Governor De Laage realizes that everyone – white and native – has now turned against him, even his priest. When Father Paul secretly aids Terangi, De Laage confronts him. “You're all guilty. The whole island … You helped Terangi. You, my own priest … You helped a murderer.”
“I aided a man whose heart is innocent,” replies Father Paul.
“You've betrayed your own government … given aid to anarchy and bloodshed.”
The priest casts his eyes skyward. “There are stronger things than governments in this world, De Laage. Something deeper. More real.”
Set on a mad course of vengeance and colonial honor, and against the warnings of both Madame De Laage and Kersaint (“hear God howl and laugh at you”), Governor De Laage commandeers the Catapoa. In the midst of their escape, Terangi, Marama, and their young child return to Manakoora to save their people. Kersaint and some of the natives take to surfboats. Despite native warnings, Father Paul and Madame De Laage head for the church. Winds tear the governor's mansion to pieces. As the church is destroyed by a tsunami, Terangi pushes through the waves to the vestibule's doors. Father Paul gives Madame De Laage over to Terangi, and, as the priest and his last few parishioners sing, the walls crumbles atop them. Waves overwhelm the island. After the storm, De Laage returns to the ruins, believing his wife dead. But she is alive in a hidden cove, with Terangi and his family. As the Catapoa approaches, Madame De Laage helps launch Terangi's canoe. The governor, overcome by the sentiment his honor can no longer hold in check, watches through binoculars as Terangi and family escape, and, although he clearly sees the natives, he tells his wife “it's only a floating log.”
It is useful to compare this climax to the more conventionally orientalist Bird of Paradise (1932) analyzed by Shohat and Stam. The story of a romance between a “white” sailor and a South Seas “native,” King Vidor's film contains many similar narrative elements, but in the service of a substantially different narrative goal.
The South Seas native woman (Dolores del Rio) metaphorizes her land; she betokens the “natural” paradise untouched by “civilization.” But the very same ecologically harmonious landscape which yields a cornucopia of food abruptly metamorphoses, during the course of the film, into a threatening volcanic universe, a disordered hysterical body, as pastoral nature is inundated by the lava which swallows and sucks into itself the very beauty to which it had given birth. In the traditional equation between nature and woman, the South Seas heroine mirrors these opposites of Edenic pacificity and infernal danger … If the initial images associate the del Rio character with peaceful water, the final shots superimpose her image over flames – an infernal punishment for the sexually hungry subaltern as well as for the prescientific natives.Footnote 28
Like Bird of Paradise, The Hurricane sexualizes the native population, inscribing them as the other of European colonial honor and repression. But while del Rio represents temptation and sinfulness, there is a paradoxical innocence about the sexuality of Manakoora's population. Like Terangi, they may be guilty in the eyes of the law, but their hearts are innocent. It is the law itself that imposes and provokes guilt. While the volcano in the earlier film destroys the dangerous subalterns, here the hurricane symbolizes decolonization. Most of the natives are destroyed during this symbolic uprising. But Terangi preserves the new national consciousness forged through struggle. After all, as the film argued throughout, Terangi is his people. He is their symbolic embodiment, and the hope of all the world's “races” afflicted by the scourge of European imperialism.
While Shohat and Stam offer a compelling argument about the orientalist representation of the “natives,” they say very little about the representation of “white” culture and society. Here, too, a comparison between Bird of Paradise and The Hurricane is in order. In Vidor's film, “white” Western society is represented as the site of advancement, technology, and accomplishment. While Joel McCrea's sailor enjoys his island vacation, that “paradise” is ultimately unsatisfying. He offers to take his native lover (del Rio) back to the “civilization” for which he clearly pines:
“I'm gonna take you home with me … I'm gonna take you back to civilization where we don't have any crazy superstitious ideas about volcanoes being mad at people and putting a curse on them.”
“Civilization, where's that?”
“Why, that's not a place. That's where things are happening. Where people are accomplishing something.”
McCrea goes on to describe to his “primitive” lover the technological accomplishments of his civilization, like radio, electric lights, and phonographs. Even though in her responses del Rio “makes civilization look silly, really it's not.” The sailor offers an extended description of San Francisco that expresses both his wonder at technological achievement and the conveniences of the modern world (“restaurants, parties, speedboats, airplanes roaring through the sky”) and his longing for the city he has left behind.
Ford and Nichols paint a much more ambivalent picture of the Western world. Through Marama's exchange with Terangi, when she requests her red shoes, dress, petticoat, and hat, and through the icon of the dancing doll Terangi purchases for his love, Ford and Nichols depict “civilization” as a site of consumption and useless production; through their portrayal of the white colonial lords, the West becomes the source of domination and subjugation. The Westerners who do receive kind attention in the film often represent traditions that stand against modernity (Kersaint, Father Paul, Madame De Laage). In other words, a certain traditionalist aversion to modernity seems to underlie their nearly radical critique of western colonialism.
Nonetheless, faced with a stark recognition of the contradictions and corruption of imperial racism, Ford and Nichols cannot provide a political resolution. Rather than staging a more literally figured native uprising against colonial oppression, they take flight into allegory. In a scene that anticipates the final sequence of Stagecoach, where the outlaw and the prostitute ride off to liberty across the border, it is only by fleeing the white man's gaze, out across the open sea, that Terangi's people find freedom.
CONCLUSION
John Ford and Dudley Nichols's The Hurricane offers a critique of colonialism unique for its time. Indeed, in their rendering of the dialectic of colonized desire and the evolution of a nationalist consciousness among the dispossessed, the writer and director offer a stark critique of Western domination that has few parallels in twentieth-century American cinema. By mobilizing a traditionalist revulsion toward modernity, they provide an almost radical critique of imperialism and an argument about decolonized national consciousness that anticipates the work of Frantz Fanon. At the same time, quite unlike Fanon, this attack is premised upon an orientalism that celebrates the “wild savagery” of native peoples. In Ford's and Nichols's cinema of the same period, African Americans are depicted as lazy and dependent. They require the guidance and the firm hand of white authority.
In their final collaboration, Pinky (1949), Nichols demonstrates an evolution of his racial attitudes. The story of a young woman who passes as white, and her black grandmother, played by Ethel Waters, this film directly confronts American racial attitudes in a cinematic language that largely rejects the racial paternalism found in Judge Priest. But Ford did not like the politics of Nichols's representation. He and Daryl Zanuck, the producer, called in screenwriter Philip Dunne as a fixer. When Nichols objected, Ford said, “Well, Dudley always was a sort of white nigger, anyway.”Footnote 29 With the rewritten screenplay, Ford still could not complete the picture, primarily because Waters refused to play the “Mammy” that Ford wanted on the screen. Zanuck recalled that “Ford's Negroes were like Aunt Jemima. Caricatures … Ford had old-fashioned race views.” Zanuck gave the picture to Elia Kazan.Footnote 30
Yet, during this same period, Ford's attitudes toward American colonialism and the genocide against Native Americans showed a profound alteration. In many ways, Fort Apache (1948) is a virtual remake of The Hurricane, with Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda) and his unbending sense of imperial honor standing in for De Laage, while Captain York (John Wayne) represents the liminal figure speaking for the colonized peoples conquered by the United States. Unlike the earlier picture, however, this film turns a critical eye on American imperialism.Footnote 31 Even as Ford held fast to his racist perceptions of African Americans, he was able to represent the injustices of imperialism and colonialism against America's “afflicted race,” the “Indians.” Both attitudes would sustain his work for the rest of his life, with films that continued the critique of American genocidal policies against Native Americans (The Searchers (1956), Cheyenne Autumn (1964)), and others that continued to represent African Americans as dependent and servile (The Sun Shines Bright (1953), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)). Some of these films were box-office successes (The Searchers, Liberty Valance); some were failures (The Sun Shines Bright, Cheyenne Autumn). This dyadic racial perspective allowed Ford, and perhaps much of his audience, to normalize white supremacy at home while justifying American military adventures abroad in the name of freedom for the world's “afflicted races.”Footnote 32
