Evan, in a recent article, listed The Proposition as a worthy but unsung film. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been working for some time on explaining what I found so fascinating about it, and here is my best attempt so far to put it into words.
As a long time Nick Cave fan I was probably a bit too geeked out at the idea of seeing what he could do with a screenplay. What resulted did not disappoint. Very few singer/songwriters can cross over into film successfully, but you have to admit that Cave’s writing has always been unrelentingly cinematic. And a “Western” set in the Australian outback seemed to be a particularly well-suited backdrop for his characteristically brutal brand of story telling.
That aside, what floored me about this film was not just its gorgeously raw and beautiful aesthetic, but its moral complexity. Cave deals masterfully with some of the deepest currents of what it means to be morally responsible to other human beings and what the fundamental nature of civilization is.
The first picture one needs to have in mind when coming to this film is that of civilization being a fragile thing cultivated against a backdrop of anarchy, always in jeopardy. Civilization, on one level, means laying aside violence so as to cultivate prosperity through mutual cooperation. But the result of this prosperity is that the civilization has now created something it needs to protect, violently if required. And now this violence is not comprised of individual violent forces but one collective violent force.
The second necessary picture is that of moral responsibility inherently drawing a line between one’s own people and the rest of the world. We would like to think the value of human life is universal, but this has not always been the prevailing belief. Throughout nearly all of human development morality has drawn a circle around the family, the tribe, the nation and its allies, and privileged them as being truly human. The outsider, the threat, the other is demonized and becomes less than human. At some core level human moral responsibility always becomes variable and it is our higher ideals that have to fight to make our moral obligation universal to all human beings.
The primary conflict of The Proposition is between an exposed and vulnerable English settlement in the Australian outback and the renegade Arthur Burns gang. At the opening of the film the Burns gang has already laid waste to a homestead, raping and killing a pregnant woman and killing her husband before setting fire to all the buildings. In vengeance the English troopers kill most of the gang, but capture Arthur Burns’ two younger brothers, Charlie and Mikey, who had recently split up with the gang over that incident. Mikey, the youngest, brother is mentally underdeveloped and quite dependent on Charlie. Captain Stanley, the head of the force that apprehended Charlie and Mikey, proposes to let Charlie free on the condition that he bring back the real target, Arthur Burns. If Charlie fails to return by Christmas Stanley will hang young Mikey.
Captain Stanley comes across throughout the film as a character who, despite being put into very difficult circumstances, truly believes in civilization and moral obligation. When he wishes to tame Australia it is clear that this means making the land into a place where the vulnerable and defenseless, especially women and children, do not need to live in fear. He is entirely protective of his wife, attempting to shelter her from the reality of their situation, yet in doing so he often makes her feeling of isolation all the worse. He is a good and decent person yet in the background remains the unspoken flaw is that he is participating, indirectly at least, in a campaign of genocide against Australia’s aboriginal people. Despite the moral worth he invests in civilization, the civilization itself is falling short of its own standards.
The problem for Stanley is that he has few compatriots who share his idealism. Most of the troopers under his command display, time and again, that they only behave as civil agents out of fear. They exhibit crass misogyny and a delight in cruelty that is only tempered by a fear of punishment. By all appearances the only thing that separates them from the Burns gang is their cowardice. For characters such as these the essence of civilization is that of restraining base behavior through institutionalized consequences.
On the other side of Captain Stanley is his boss Eden Fletcher. In Fletcher’s character we see a very different view of civilization. He too operates at the boundaries of society but in him we see a portrait of civilization as cruelty, not banished, but refined and sharpened. His idea of civilization is that of collective action enabling a level of might that cannot be contested and is accountable to no one. Fletcher stands as a decision maker whose job it is to sublimate and channel the cruelty of those at his disposal to terrify and overcome his enemies absolutely. Fletcher unflinchingly demands those under him to torture prisoners and massacre aboriginal peoples both out of retribution in order to destroy the morale of their enemies. Civilization, in Fletcher’s hands, becomes an absolute tyrant who, once offended, can only be propitiated by subjecting the offender to unmitigated suffering and then utter destruction.
For Arthur Burns and his gang, civilization is much simpler. The battle lines are drawn so that it is his family and friends versus the rest of the civilized world. Sociopathic as he is, Arthur Burns is not difficult to understand. Loyalty and ethical duty to his family, born and adopted, are absolute; moral obligation to the rest of the world simply does not exist. Arthur Burns’ way of life seems to exist to call out the hypocrisy of Fletcher’s type of civilization; his actions speak a deep seated conviction that the only lasting truth is cruelty and he needs no pretensions to civilization to justify it. Given that he and his band are made up of Irish expatriates forcibly deported and aboriginal people it is not difficult to understand the source of his cynicism. However, he falls clearly short of being a rebel hero in that his war against civilization leads him to condone the rape and slaughter of innocents for no higher purpose than revenge.
What really brings the question of the scope of moral responsibility into sharp relief is the strong similarity between Charlie, the protagonist, and Captain Stanley. Both of them, in their own ways, reveal a deep struggle between their convictions that right and wrong extend beyond personal loyalties and the loyalties themselves. Stanley agonizes deeply when he finds himself used as Fletcher’s choice instrument of cruelty, and finds himself needing to rebel in his own ways against the civilization he is trying to cultivate. As the film progresses he finds himself increasingly at odds with his own people and an outsider amongst those with whom he has allegiance.
It is clear from the first that Charlie too sees his own gang as having transgressed boundaries that even an outlaw ought to be above transgressing. When he leaves Arthur behind his convictions cost him and Mikey their best source of protection and they pay dearly for it. He may leave the gang, but he is still an outlaw and his personal redemption counts for nothing at all to redeem him to the civilized world. Charlie, like Stanley ends up estranged from his own and in that most vulnerable of middle grounds because he believes in a moral duty to human beings that must, at times, trump even the loyalty of blood.
The point is that both Captain Stanley and Charlie, in their respective ways, exceed the moral standards of those around them. They exhibit, not simple goodness, but ethical greatness. They themselves may be flawed and even despicable at times, yet they still manage to become morally greater than their natures should allow. Where they stood no one could fault them for pursuing a course of vengeance and retribution, but in the end, both set that aside as civilized people in a way that put civilization itself to shame.
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Tim Yoder is currently working as a Web Developer and generalized professional geek. He mucks about with a lot of things, like drawing, painting, design, traditional archery, cooking, theology and philosophy.
I’ve been reading Blood Meridian lately. I think the themes you explored are among the most powerful in every one of McCarthy’s novels. That I’ve read, anyway. The Road, for example. This conflict between civilization and chaos is at the heart of the western, it seems. Great essay, and this film is fantastic. I’ll have to watch it again now.
Tim, this essay is excellent. We’ve talked in the past about this film, but you have put into words what I could not. Especially when you say-
“By all appearances the only thing that separates them from the Burns gang is their cowardice.”
“Where they stood no one could fault them for pursuing a course of vengeance and retribution, but in the end, both set that aside as civilized people in a way that put civilization itself to shame.”
Man, I just watched this movie a few weeks ago and I already want to watch it again.