Directors today almost entirely mobilize the wide-screen canvas to insist on the weight, purpose, and “big-ness” of their films (c.f. Christopher Nolan) or because it connotes cinematic acumen and anoints them as a filmmaker of legitimacy (c.f., most recently, Ryan Coogler). Rare is the Hollywood film that mobilizes wide-screen to articulate just how little it knows, and just how entangled its own relationship with American “big-ness” is. Robert Altman – maybe only Robert Altman  – treats the elephantine canvas as a termite colony and a void, a busy, buzzing confusion of event and a supreme nothingness. His widest canvases are sloppy and wayward, fashioning confused, quasi-structureless saunters through the limits of American mythology, sideways ambles through America’s pretensions about itself. He fashions a frame that is both a critique of American egotism and a mode of diffusing it.

At the beginning of Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, a narrator informs us that the Wild West was a celebration of  “the anonymous,” promising a democratic affair of “these brave souls” and their unclaimed, but undaunted, effort to survive a harsh wasteland.  As the frame lights up to view the outskirts of wild-man performer Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling circus show,  the narrator promises that Altman’s open canvas would be a democratic frame: one that incorporates the many, the liminal, the rogues, the outsiders, and allows them a moment to be counted, to be claimed in an image that doesn’t treat any of them as any more worthwhile than anyone else. This is America’s promise, and Altman’s most generous films ask what it would look like to fulfill that aspiration. Like an old-school Hollywood epic, Altman luxuriates in performative showmanship and grandiosity, yet he also smuggles in a neo-realist sense of multiplicity and ambivalence. His camera seems as though it could go anywhere, discover something new, as though it hasn’t figured itself out yet. His frame itself is a metaphor for America’s Phoenix-like belief in self-revising openness, in the capacity to find, in the margins of the frame, an undiscovered potential just begging to be catalyzed into kinesis.

Altman’s frame is also an expression of the nation’s delusory subscription to ideas about itself that doom that promise from the start, that mutate even openness and freedom into most pernicious modes of control. Yes, Altman’s camera looks and searches. It also seems like it might topple over at a moment’s notice, exploring the inner workings of a Wild West performance show that it neither understands nor celebrates. Paul Lohmann’s cinematography is sickly, jaundiced, and uncertain. The narration is spoken by a man who sounds like he’s about to drop dead. This is not an authentic America, but an incestuous tangle of ideas and iconographies, history and mythology, gazed at in a film that exposes inauthenticity as America’s core potential, and its final failing. In a nation where everyone is a momentary performer of the possible, where “the legend” is more important than the “fact,” as a famous man who made famous Westerns once famously said, Buffalo Bill (Paul Newman) is as American as apple pie with razor blades in it. He is like Andy Warhol, another American prophet of secular mysticism, who hides within the gap between freedom and oppression and exposes play itself as a particularly brutal mode of control.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians takes a good long while to reveal its titular character to us. We see him from behind, and from afar, and from away, before we really see him, but he controls everything as he knows nothing. America the rogue, perpetual outsider is also America the dynasty, always finding a way to manipulate freedom into oppression. When Cody wanders out to be seen for the first time, we can’t even see him. He wants to hide in the background of frames, to seem like he isn’t commanding the text, yet America has trouble escaping his orbit. Rare is the film that uses the wide-screen to critique its own “big-ness,” I wrote. Rarer still is the film that recognizes how America uses “small-ness” to mask its own modes of power.

What else is it to invite “the Indians” to perform in his stage-show rather than kill them off? Rather than a monumental death, they are expected to wither into small-ness. Speaking on Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), the Lakota leader who famously, violently resisted white encroachment on his land and genocide of his people and then famously joined Buffalo Bill’s Western showcase to play himself as a heel, the film remarks that “if he wasn’t interested in show business, he wouldn’t have become a chief.” Altman manages, with his peculiar ability to make empathy and acid soluble, to convey that the character speaking this line about Sitting Bull is right, but that this doesn’t invalidate the way in which white Americans were stacking the show business deck. Everyone engages in inauthenticity, in the construction of their identity, and there are power relations all the way down, but some performances of power are relatively hegemonic in the context of American nationalism.

Altman exposes how those who appear to be cavorting with history are in fact controlling it, and how those who seem to playing along are actually writhing with discontent. He acknowledges that putting Sitting Bull in a show to mock him is a slower, perhaps more degrading death than murder. Yet he also explores Sitting Bull’s own inversion of American history, and meditates on the limits of that inversion. Performing for an audience, Sitting Bull points a loaded gun up at President Grover Cleveland (Pat McCormick), causing audible terror, only to fire a bit higher at the last minute. The crowd is shocked and thrilled, and the President himself calls Sitting Bull a “wonderful comedian,” a veritable embodiment of American showmanship, before another audience member calls him “un-American.” The irony here is that he is, or they assume him to be, staking his claim as an authentic American, channeling the amoral force that is the spirit of America as a comic, performative stage for momentary creativity, what Ralph Ellison called the “American joke.” Sitting Bull is playing along, with a vengeance. The president finds this just peachy keen, for the moment.

Yet Altman is aware that the joke is, finally, on Sitting Bull, and that its contours can slip and bend to the rhythms of American power when necessary.  When Sitting Bull confronts the President off-stage, this time with a sincere proposal, he is mocked. “Don’t you understand American,” he is told, which now amounts to a claim that “in government nothing is simple,” that politics is too complicated to hear a Native American voice, or to endorse a Native American proposal. Complexity, as it so often does, becomes a mask for inertia. The chief leaves unheard because his capacity to make a claim has been preempted: “doesn’t make any difference, it’s out of the question,” the President now remarks. Basic principles of petitioning, of reciprocity, of being heard, don’t apply. The chief may know how to play a comedian, but America controls the rules of the game. His shadowy gun, finally, is just that, a reenactment of noble resistance defanged of real retaliation or threat. When the President refuses to hear Sitting Bull, one of Buffalo Bill’s underlings celebrates this as the President’s “basic pioneer perception,” an ability to “know enough to retaliate before it’s his turn.” America’s language of adaptation and contingent cunning, or finding and potentializing the “right” moment and taking the right chance, is exposed as a facade of power. The creative response becomes a preemptive strike that shapes the narrative before it had a chance to emerge as the perpetually incipient, playful fount of self-revitalizing contingency that America rhetorically promises.

Therein lies the malicious, misfit genius of the screenplay by Altman and Alan Rudolph (yes, that one), adapted from Arthur Kopit’s 1969 play Indians: it sees America as a perpetual motion machine beginning and ending with itself. When talking about Native Americans, Buffalo Bill says they “stay the same, that’s going backwards,” summoning specters of historical inertia and inability to adapt and progress like red-blooded, white-skinned Americans. But when he speaks on himself, Bill can only claim that he’s “supposed to stay the same.” A celebration of purported American growth, cunning, and bootstrap ingenuity, requiring an outsider foil doomed to the miasma of their own purported lethargy, must become a performance of mythopoetic American stillness. America, it seems, must be always in motion yet essentially always the same. In reality, Altman suggests, it is just exerting more and more effort to do less and less, to hustle and hustle in circles to the same spot. Buffalo Bill, not knowing it, opens a self-contradiction that he can only pretend to paper over. The fun-house of American history, so many warped mirrors and unstable truths, is also Medusa’s gaze.

Still, Altman clearly enjoys the show. Against the impulse to ward off contamination by fictiveness, Altman manages to suggest history fashioning its own mythology, suffusing his film with an aura of mischievous curiosity about the limits of truth. That Buffalo Bill does so without being overtly post-modern or having to expose himself for us is Altman’s perhaps singular gift as a filmmaker. Altman’s Nashville deconstructed the American performative idiom as a conscious product of bicentennial American patriotism. Here, he reveals an America cultivating  this idiom a century before-hand. Altman sees a nation as a funhouse of fluxional truth where desperado freedom becomes a forge for repression itself. When Buffalo Bill is romancing a woman, the film positions a painting of himself in between them in the frame. He’s really looking at himself in this image, visually breaking up their fleshy communion in the frame, a feedback loop in which what looks like democracy is an echo chamber.

By the end of the film, Bill has self-actualized with himself. His images of himself become taxidermied monuments of history, looming as specters of American gigantism, haunted effigies of a historical demiurge now conjuring shadows of himself to haunt him in his own Xanadu. While Bill needs to keep himself at this distance, to refract himself across the screen, to bequeath images of himself for others to see so they don’t come too close to the real thing, Altman finds time for one final, appreciably demented zoom in onto his anti-hero’s starstruck, self-aggrandizing eyes. It’s an image as invasive as the iridescent diamond in the opium den at the end of McCabe & Ms. Miller, a vision of personal myopia in which democratic rowdiness and glistening polyphonic openness are singed by the scorch of one man’s hallucinatory mania. He is a prophet of redemptive play as a vision of American emancipation, a shrewd, crafty devil policing the acceptable boundaries of play for himself. The possibility of participating in the idiom, of becoming a genuine American trickster, is the film’s question. The peril of it is Sitting Bull’s History Lesson.

Score: 8.5/10