Red River (1948) - the homoerotic Western par excellence
Critics have dubbed the film the homoerotic Western par excellence largely because of the unsettling Oedipal relationship between Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) and his adoptive son, Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift). The two men clash during a gruelling 1,000-mile cattle drive, tension which escalates with the hiring of Cherry Valance (John Ireland), a gunfighter who forms a heavily subtextual rivalry with Garth. In the face of Dunson’s increasingly tyrannical behaviour, Garth, with Valance’s prompting, stages a mutiny, leading to Dunson to vow deadly vengeance. Along the trail, Garth saves Tess Millay (Joanne Dru) from an Indian attack and forms a snuggly relationship. When Dunson catches up with them, a brutal fight between Dunson and Garth is only stopped when Tess draws a gun on them both, forcing them to realize their underlying love and finally reconcile.
In this film, and the Western more broadly, the gun is an almost parodic signifier of queer sexuality. For cowboys living in an all-male bunkhouse, regular use of the gun makes up for irregular use of the penis: proficiency signifies virility; ineptitude marks emasculation; and those who are too old or too young or too deskbound to carry a gun aren’t real men. In Freudian terms, the gun functions as a prosthetic phallus - the smoking barrel and the cocking hammer binding violence to potency and masculine legitimacy. In ostentatious displays of machismo, these guns are polished, fondled, measured, pressed into each other’s faces, before being slotted back into low-slung leather holsters, which frame the crotch area for our voyeuristic attention. This is the case when Garth encounters cocky gunslinger Cherry Valance:
That’s a good-looking gun you were about to use back there. Can I see it? And you’d like to see mine.
With no spectators and no women regulating their behaviour, the scene plays as an erotic exchange thinly veiled as technical appraisal. The dialogue fits easily into a discourse on mutual masturbation (Hey! Hey! That’s good too! Go on! Keep it going!) and ejaculation (all those popping cans) with even an “I’m not gay but ...” moment when Cherry introduces women and Swiss watches. The Swiss watch is out of place in the Western and is an attempt to introduce heterosexuality while highlighting its absence: these men know nothing about either Swiss watches or women.
Despite this loaded beginning, their romance does not develop, and Garth is saved from future transgression through the introduction of Tess Millay. Their meeting deliberately echoes the film’s opening scene, in which Dunson abandoned his own wife during an Indian attack. However, where Dunson professes love while fleeing responsibility, Garth saves Tess’s life without erotic investment.
When Garth announces that he will have to cut away her clothes and suck out the poison, the scene is saturated with erotic coding that he himself seems not to register.
The body language suggests a detached eroticism, her wise-cracks a counterweight to his competent indifference. The way he sucks out the “poison” and spits it out oscillates between disengagement and visceral repulsion toward the heterosexual experience. Why the slap? Because she hates the way Garth looks down on her because he thinks she’s a saloon girl; because his coldness offends her vanity; and structurally, to align her with Dunson - the only other person to slap Garth in the film. Both form part of an erotic triangle for Garth’s heart.
The displacement of feelings is made more explicit during a nocturnal encounter, when Tess goes looking for him as he watches over his herd. As they snuggle together and Tess runs fingers suggestively over his lips, he talks wistfully about Dunson, prompting her pointed observation: “You love him, don’t you, and he must love you”
“You love him, don’t you, and he must love you”
Tess’s kiss functions ambivalently: for the audience, it squeezes gay desire back into the closet; yet for Garth, it was Dunson who was last on his lips, which orientates it towards gay desire. The kiss also has implications for Tess: it reinforces her screen role mediating rather than displacing the men’s desire: she both “outs” their love and, more importantly, legitimizes it by her acknowledgement of its power.
Tess’s presence also mediates the film’s climatic confrontation, when the conflict devolves into wrestling until Tess seizes another man’s gun and fires it.
“Anyone with half a mind would know that you two love each other!”
The tone is light but the gravity of Tess’s action is serious. In Bodies That Matter, Butler critiques Freud’s inability to conceive of phallic power without the penis arguing instead for the phallus as transferable signifier – one that circulates through performance rather than bodies alone (1). Tess’s seizure of the gun enacts precisely this transfer. By assuming the phallus, she interrupts the violent script of masculine domination and forces the men to recognize their feelings for each other.
“Garth, you better marry that girl”
Dunson’s awed “Garth, you better marry that girl” briefly gestures towards heterosexual closure, it is immediately displaced by a more meaningful act: Dunson’s promise to incorporate Garth’s initial into his cattle brand. This symbolic act, rather than the deferred wedding bells, constitutes the film’s true resolution – a homosocial marriage inscribed not on bodies but on property that perpetuates the womanless reproductive economy of the frontier.
Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge, 2011), 54-57.