Unlike other film genres, the western is indivisibly connected to U.S. origin myths. In essence, Hollywood westerns are stories America tells itself about itself. Thus, even fifty years after the western peaked in public popularity and social influence, the genre remains a fascinating canvas of dominant national ideologies upon which a multitude of cultural anxieties can be traced and studied—from race and religion to economics and politics to, most essentially and especially, gender and the performance of masculinity.

These generic codes of masculinity are indeed the subject of Matt Payne’s video essay “Who Ever Heard…?” and while the topic could easily become overreaching, Payne successfully engages the task with shrewd focus, skillful design, and playful technique.

Payne uses a single scene from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961) as the raw material—the infamous dinner scene, wherein the film’s outlaw villain (Lee Marvin), outlaw hero (John Wayne), and official hero (James Stewart) all come into conflict over a tarnished steak. The true conflict of the scene, of course, is tarnished manhood and how challenges to machismo should be properly addressed. Payne breaks the scene into a small collection of two second moments spread across nine windows. Each two seconds adds to a growing symphonic remix, using the rhythmic repetition of each moment to comment upon the ever-repeating generic codes of a classic western standoff. Vera Miles’s initial cry (“Who ever heard of a man waiting on tables?!”) is eventually joined by all manner of masculine performance, from slamming whips to the threatening snarls to guns cocking.

The choice of the scene also adds greatly to the project. Although not expressed in the author’s supporting statement, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is inherently an interrogation of the western genre. Arguably the last great work of Hollywood’s most famous western director, the film comes near the end of Hollywood’s classic western cycle and carries a deeper skepticism towards traditional American masculinity than possibly any western up to that time. Thus, it is not just codes of masculinity that ring through the Payne’s nine windows, but also challenges to these codes, as the macho threats of Wayne and Marvin are complimented by Stewart’s cries of exacerbation that men would threaten to kill each other over so little. Even Vera Miles’s titular question reveals the inquisitorial nature of film itself.

Payne’s conceit is simple and his execution deeply clever. The video and its rhythms act as a witty distancing device, offering the spectator a simple and fresh view of the scene, the genre, and the ideology.

Matthew Thomas Payne’s audiovisual essay “Who Ever Heard …?  Genre, Gender, and Repetition in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is an elegant and compact inquiry into repetition as a fundamental structuring element intertwining cinema, the Western genre, and modes of gender performance.  Repetition is of course at the heart of cinema as a technical apparatus, and a crucial if not constitutive feature of narrative, perhaps most distinctively elaborated through the editing patterns established by Hollywood (as Raymond Bellour has most influentially demonstrated); if these fundamental repetitions escape attention through the flows of the film itself or our engagement with story, repetition is often foregrounded at another level through genre, commonly dismissed as simply repetitive by critics but appreciated by fans who enjoy the musical model of repetition with variation – a formal pattern Payne employs effectively by turning the hard slap of Liberty Valance’s whip into the video essay’s sonic beat.   (More broadly, Ford’s film has been understood as both a significant variation within both the Western genre as well as his own oeuvre.) 

Illuminating these interlocking levels of repetition – from those disavowed by the cinematic apparatus to those anticipated as the conventions of genre – would be a rewarding critical exercise in itself.  But Payne’s manipulation of Ford’s scene, again, lends his material a strong backbeat, while polyphonic “lyrics” are derived from the snatches of dialog that here become chants through the rhythmic repetition that renders language ritualistic.  As his title and motivating quotation emphasize, in this Western, questions (as well as guns) are loaded.  Indeed, Payne’s demand that we listen to Hallie’s rhetorical question again and again confirms  that her expression of a traditional gender norm through a question that expects no answer  condenses cultural assumptions about proper gender roles that have seemed foundational to the Western, if not Hollywood cinema overall.  However, if the Western is often accused of reducing hypermasculine male characters to clearly opposed heroes and villains, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance provides three representatives of American masculinity, brought together in this scene in a feminized “domestic” space rather than on the uncivilized frontier, and at a moment when gender roles are felt to be unbalanced through an emasculated man serving food (steak, of course) to other men.  Payne’s video places these characters and their roles in relief by simultaneously linking and isolating them on a grid, enhancing our ability to analyze what Ford dramatizes.

This distance, combined with the pedagogical function of repetition, helps reveal how in this scene whips and guns remain implicit threats, while verbal threats are displaced into statements about meat; as Payne’s strategies emphasize, cowboy boots are the primary tools of physical violence in this scene.  Payne’s nine-screen pattern allows him (and us) to play a clever game of addition and subtraction, as well as continuity and substitution, that remains remarkably easy to follow and that skillfully modulates sounds to simultaneously overlap and come to the fore.  This careful organization of the screen (and soundtrack) subtly alludes to other spatial modes of repetition – games like tic-tac-toe or chess, or the panel construction of comic books – as well as the temporal models I’ve already noted of beat-driven music or vocal chanting that renders verbal communication as ritual.  But the video essay’s real achievement is to suggest that these fundamental formal repetitions may extend to and sustain residual ideological patterns in which women cook and serve the Western beef that men eat and find ways to fight over.