The center of Alex Cox’s Walker is a ministerial hat and enigmatic gait loosely adorning a void. It walks around, hero and victim of its own self-effacing aura, clearly considering itself both the herald of a new dawn and the scion of a long, unfurling divine edict. “What do you mean tactics?,” it self-certainly intones at one point, suggesting a preordained vision beyond the need for practical engagement. For it, the self is a force beyond finitude, mortality, even contingency, striding through a conflict while everyone around it is served up as cosmic grist. At one point, it shoots a guy into a coffin that seems to have been placed there by the divine set-hands of a filmmaker god. Narrating in the third person, it saunters around with a radiant aura that signals delusional tranquility masquerading as grace, suggesting that it is a functional non-character in a comic sketch about itself that it cannot recognize. It is a man working for “god, science, and hygiene,” a figure who turns self-abnegation into pure egotism as it stretches its soul over the American leviathan and, in doing so, thins itself into a vacuum, becoming one with the empty icon it understands itself to embody and represent.

“It” is our man of practical affairs, William Walker (Ed Harris), real life nineteenth century filibuster who lead a military effort to establish a US-backed government in Nicaragua and thereby extend imperial rule, and Manifest Destiny, Southward. Walker, in this film, wants his Nicaragua to be “whole and perfect and outside of time,” a miniature version of a dream America sanctioned by God as an idealist, transcendental paradise. When he stares at a carved Aztec statue at one point, he blankly looks into its eyes in search of a clear connection, assimilating its difference into his own self-portrait, colonizing its image in the name of his enigmatic, empty grandeur. He sees himself as beyond time – which is how he characterizes this statue with his eyes – but also as opaque and sublime – which is how he undoubtedly sees the indigenous empire he enigmatically views as both self and other. He wishes to impose, and to impose himself as, another exalted totem of American hubris devoid of particularity or resistance. In this world, everything can only be a facet of himself, lost fragments of his American ego ready for reincorporation into the maw of this monomaniacal Ahab.

In this, at least, the Aztec statue is genuinely like him. Just as he destroys the history it represents as a particular, non-self-same thing, he destroys himself as an individual unit who can connect with difference. His friend dies and he responds like he has never met the guy. When he introduces slavery to the colonies, that he is raising an ethical question does not dawn on him. “The colonel says this is democracy,” and this is what democracy entails to him. When he says “the ends justify the means,” he is asked “what are the ends?” Responding “I can’t remember,” it seems less as though he has really forgotten something than that it never impressed on him that this would be something he would have to explain to himself, or even to understand, in the first place. His wife can’t speak his language but seems to know more about how humanity functions than anyone else in the film. This is not charisma sublimating reason but an opacity devouring both.  He has wandered into a history that cannot justify itself, that needs no justification, one governed by a much larger force that doesn’t deem it necessary for him to be in on. The forces of empire would just find another weapon if they needed to.

Which they do. When Walker’s twentieth-century offspring surrealistically show up at the end to extract these nineteenth-century ghosts into the new world of American empire that they have paved the way for, allowing them passage into the future they’ve inaugurated, Walker only has a place for it in spirit. His body is dissident, or rather, perhaps it is too literal. Declaring himself the president of Nicaragua, not only the agent of America, he enacts the American prophecy of Manifest Destiny only to try to destroy it in the name of expanding it, revealing its inner contradictions in the process. He claims sovereignty and national determination, the very ethos of American rhetoric, the poetry of the national soul, but not in a way that America wishes to acknowledge. Because America cannot name these tensions, he must be devoured by future America, left as detritus in its past, to absolve the nation of its historical sins. Much like Colonel Kurtz, he is the offspring of American imperialism who, in not fully playing by its rules (in affirming and denouncing America), exposes the nation’s conundrums. In the end, he is a post-modern Lawrence of Arabia, one who, unlike Lawrence, does not consciously realize that he is a pawn in a canvas, cinematic or imperial, that he cannot fully grasp.

Nor can the film grasp it, even as it understands its ungraspability completely. The film’s big gambit is that it makes U.S. empire completely entirely illegible and yet utterly banal, at once completely mystifying and stunningly transparent. It has a Byzantine logic, but also an entirely uncomplicated, even nonexistent one. Thus, the film is a farcical, Dadaist collage of imperial signifiers, a soulful 4-hour epic desiccated into an 87-minute corpse that explains nothing about itself, seemingly cutting out most of the linking detail, failing to tie up its loose ends. The mischievous Cox, emboldened by the underground success of his punk classic Repo Man, utilizes the mock classical framing of an Old Hollywood epic but frequently untethers the film’s composure as it descends into barely contained chaos, revealing itself as a comic aria of destruction, a tableaux of death and disfigurement. A screening of this with Ishtar, another mischievous career-killing 1987 anti-epic about Americans meddling in foreign affairs and hopelessly unable to fully comprehend the implications of their actions, would be very interesting. Aguirre done by Monty Python.

Score: 10/10