A camera saunters into a lonely bar on the edge, and in the middle, of nowhere. It confronts its own face on a wanted poster, and then it rips the poster off the wall before solidifying as a shadow before it steps inside. This is a man, presumably, defacing his codified image, asserting himself as the real deal above and beyond the law’s version of him. But it also could be the wanted image – the weird, antagonistic mixture of legislated object and mythic subject, contained image and resistant force – enfleshing itself, giving itself the body of a human, enacting itself as a becoming. Here is a figure who knows he is a wanted thing and wants to both defile and endorse that wanted-ness in his act of defilement. The shadow seems to corporealize out of a mixture of nothing and everything, to make itself in the act of disregarding the law and embodying the law. The shadow becomes Judge Roy Bean by recognizing that its resistance to the law, in a nation that worships dissidence and rebellion if framed in terms that can be enfolded into the national narrative, is its way of becoming the law.  

How could this film’s titular character sustain such a contradiction? We might instead ask: how has America? How have Americans lived within this contradiction for nearly a quarter millennium? The film’s opening is a vision of America’s founding writ large: a nation that wants to act as though it has always been there, always enshrined within some kind of law, and yet always incipient, always making itself new, always entangled in the act of defiling itself and critiquing itself. In disregarding the law, in ravaging it, America becomes the law. It founds itself on an act of anti-foundational behavior. It consecrates itself through a profaning gesture. It aggrandizes itself in the act of defiling itself. In escaping itself, in dismissing the rules by which it is supposed to live, it embodies its truest essence, returning to the primordial act of poetic imagination that has inspired and tortured, enrobed and denied, so many American writers and thinkers.

In this film, the figure is named, or rather names itself, Judge Roy Bean (enfleshed as Paul Newman), a man who becomes an allegory of American self-contradiction. Distilling a nation’s ability to overwrite its internal chaos with celebratory myths of inaugural innocence, he has no problem bequeathing himself with vagabond legitimacy wherein his sheer act of will becomes divine justification for violence. “I never killed a man before,” “I shot at some” but “I never hit anyone,” he remarks after a particularly unlikely showdown in which he vanquishes everyone. God himself must have left him off the hook before this – must have kept him pure – only to bestow him now with the gift of sacrosanct justice. He also, he claims, understands the law “since I live in flagrant disregard for it.” This is the ruffian as a dynasty, a vision of outsider frontiersmanship as Manifest Destiny. He is, in other words, an out-law, a man who will turn his perpetual errantry into a vision of redemptive self-authoring, who by being outside the law can be the law. Judge Roy Bean is like America, a self-legitimizing and finally self-insulating force that arrogates for itself the right to arbitrate justice, to lay down the rule of law, while also implying that it is simply enacting a higher one through its refusal of any other earthly tribunal. The Life and Times is nothing less than a travesty of America’s creation myth, a fire-and-brimstone desecration of the abiding faith that whatever the nation means can be traced back through to an initial act of originality.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is a whole-cloth vision of the tattered American mosaic. What keeps it from choking on its ideas, being mummified in its blatantly allegorical posture, is how ragged the cloth is. This film understands that America is a wild, mercurial solution, an outsider-insider art, because the film itself is the product of two men who were both outlaws and in-laws to Hollywood, and who were each in liminal moments of their careers, either no longer or not yet mainstream forces. The work of late-period John Huston and inchoate John Milius, the film feels like an act of misguided alchemy, the savagely undisciplined pulse of two frustrated egos not at home in the world.

The film wears the two men’s contradictions on its sleeve. Huston, a life-long renegade who was nonetheless born into and continued-on a Hollywood dynasty, here embodies what the literary theorist Edward Said called “late style,” a mode in which the restlessness of an author’s life-long grappling with truth does not resolve into serene equilibrium or beautiful harmony but instead intensifies into a vision that becomes, near-death, more conflicted, more contorted, more contaminated with irresolution. For Milius, who would soon clarify himself into a reactionary, pre-modern mystic, a volcanic texture most famously welded into the hard-bodied, iron-jawed, but also strangely opaque and vulnerable Conan the Barbarian, this feels like the viciously playful early ‘70s cynicism of a wayward youth in search of a narrative.

In this sense, The Life and Times feels simultaneously like a growing and a waning image, a playground for an adrift elder statesman who never really felt at home in the mid-century and a young renegade who has no idea how to resolidify himself amidst the acid bath of the late ‘60s and the demise of the dream of escaping that mid-century. It feels like a lost film, a work of narcissistic melancholy as two men who can’t figure themselves out unleash themselves on the screen with a brutal and commandeering individualism, a Pollock-esque splatter-fest ejaculating two untrammeled egos. The film works because that’s also a self-description of America, a nation subjecting its full power on the world in hope of avoiding the tensions and forces whirling and writhing within it, that cannot explain itself and so simply untethers itself upon us. This is a mess of a film, but it dramatizes America’s attempt to charismatically crystallize that mess into an image of celestial harmony through sheer willfulness. The film, like the titular figure, like America, is a lawless object obsessed with the vagaries of what it means to instantiate law out of thin air.

But Bean himself is less a poetic demiurge of order than a proto-parody of Nietzschean messianism. He discharges himself onto others, but the film understands him as a febrile forge for fleeting malice consecrated as final commandment. Huston could be willfully unrepentant, and Milius was a nasty piece of work, but these two cinematic refugees codify a text that treats its contradictions as combustible rather than commemorative and thereby banal. Together, they strike like a desert sidewinder, one whose force is derived through evasion. Hurston follows Bean’s heavenly-demonic initial enactment of violent retribution with a frankly hilarious pan across the storefront of his new hall of justice, in which he has seemingly anointed anything he can think of on the sign, advertising himself as an all-access pass to the multiform benefits of civilization. This is a democratic parody of democracy’s polyphonic pretensions, a one-size-fits-all justice system-department store backed by the might of the dozen pistols Roy Bean wears to dispense justice. He is a man who, like America, promises to do everything, to become multiform and contain multitudes, for a price.

Huston and Milius are able to critique this sensibility because they are clearly attracted to it. Roy Bean’s clean-slate zealousness and performative overkill is gleefully intoxicating, a vision of pure, Ahab-like command and romantic self-enactment. Because they seem drawn to his fervent enthusiasm and heavenly-demonic ardor but cannot make sense of him, the film responds with an essentially curious inquisitiveness.  It has little interest in whether he is a good or bad person, but it is fascinated by the fact that  he exists, and the nature of how he arbitrates the world around him on a foundation that is, finally, evaporative. Roy Bean spends the better part of the opening hour with his neck in a perpetual askew, a post-mortem slant from having been dragged nearly to his death. He spends the back half of the film repaying the debt, twisting the world around him by enforcing a fringe fiefdom where the rogue, America-like, has become a demagogue, where the rebel has become the controlling center. Along the way, Huston and Milius fashion a comic archipelago of wanderers and wayward entities who bear witness to Roy Bean’s antic enactment, for instance an itinerant preacher played by Anthony Perkins who says everything we need to know about Judge Roy Bean: “That was the first and last time I saw Judge Roy Bean. I never got back to that country and died of dysentery in Mexico. I haven’t seen him since, so he probably went to Hell.”

He does, at least, seem to have the Gods of cinema on his side when he shoots up a bar in an unholy fracas, nearly causing the building to collapse and the laws of cause and effect to implode, one man shooting his dick off as he pulls his gun out, and then shooting another man just because the script seems to need him to. Yet if Roy Bean poses as a martyr, as when he walks away, flanked by two much holier individuals, while himself donning a Jesus Christ pose, cinema can also undo his sacrosanct postures. During a hilarious montage of mock stock-images featuring Roy Bean dispensing justice, one act of directorial recalibration recontours the meaning of the image itself. In one of the images, a cinematic pan and zoom suddenly reshapes the image so that one of Roy Bean’s deputies is suddenly in the line of sight of another’s gun. They suddenly seem to be within their own line of fire, chasing themselves in a circle without a center.

Images are what matter in this film’s moral universe though. This is a man on the lookout for “sufficient moral fiber,” personal authenticity, but when he drunkenly slurs through a speech about celebrity stage actress Lillie Langtry that indicates a kind of entrancement with artifice, Milius and Huston indicate that his interior morality only goes so far.  When a drunken man is shooting everything in the bar while Roy Bean and his deputies are playing poker, they don’t react at all until the man defaces an image of Langtry, at which point everyone shoots him to death immediately. America is mercurial yet iron-clad, a nebulous smoke and mirror show and an eternal proclamation. An echo of the initial act of image-defilement that opens the film, the moment exposes The Life and Times as a film unusually attentive to the nature of America as a nation perpetually searching for redemption through self-fabrication and the policing of that self-fabrication. You can destroy the actual physical edifice with no real consequence – the nation has been on fire for decades now, and the oligarch class isn’t doing anything about it – but distorting the image is an act worthy of either worshipful devotion, for Bean, or immediate punishment, for the man who follows in his wake.

Which brings us to the third outlaw at the center of the film, Paul Newman. A vision of angry, undomesticated, tortured mid-century masculinity, Newman was both, and at once, close and distant, a vulnerable ironist who could ravage himself before the camera or erect a hall of mirrors to secure himself within his own fabricated masks. His most famous Western, George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,transparently framed the Western as a carnivalesque mythological hangout, a revelry with movie star renegades living out their own fantasy of play-acting as the poetic vagabonds of American lore. Already there, Newman’s actorly style was shot through with shards of impish self-questioning, and the actor would spend the ‘70s wrestling with that image, aging with a mixture of anger at and amusement about the limits of his self-image. While this deconstructive knowingness would reach its self-laceratingly auto-critical apex in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians a few years later, Newman’s Roy Bean is already exploring the way in which acts of self-fashioning are not only avenues of personal creativity but arbiters of acceptable behavior. Like Bean, Newman understands that the capacity to rebel against one’s imposed image is another way to police it, and that defacing one’s image is not a revelation of one’s authentic self but a means of continuing the masquerade.

One recipient of Roy Bean’s version of justice is given a eulogy as he is being hung, still on his horse, for killing an African American man. He reflects on how he committed no legal crime – what written law in 19^th century America treats killing a black man as a crime? – but that his death is morally justified because he had, at one point, killed a white man. When he speaks aloud, he remarks that he is “no worse and probably better than those about to end me.” This man is entirely sincere in his belief. Is Roy, who claims to treat any killing of any human as equally unlawful, as committed to his? Is America a genuine vision of a better world, or is it a divine folly of an escapade into a wilderness without meaning, or, worse, is it a masterfully misconstrued tangle in which cynicism is so deep that it manages to become a kind of faith? Roy can only indicate that his victim is a “well-spoken son” before enacting the hanging. Few actors could maintain such a charged collusion of irony and ecstasy like Newman to allow us to question whether Bean really believes any of what he says, or whether he is simply giving an entirely performative generosity to the damned, a hollow illusion of liberal evolution and saintly superiority. Few celebrities could court the precipice of such abyssal hollowness. We somehow think, like America itself, he has figured out a way to turn self-deception into divine sanction, to blur irony and sincerity so thoroughly that he drowns in a miasma of his own purgatorial zeal. The Wild West, like the film, can no longer tell whether it believes itself. It may know that it is lying to itself about its myths and still treat them like holy writ. The nation’s tale is a story told by a jester and a preacher man who walk into a bar to discover that they are one in the same, two men wandering around in a landscape where volatility meets vacancy, a vague cacophony of riotous nothingness.

Score: 9/10