Interpreting True Grit

Interpreting True Grit: Thoughts on the Coen Brothers Film Adaptation

A biblical subtext permeates this film and it begins with the opening Proverb: ‘The wicked flee when none pursueth.’ Much like our own time, the idea of real justice is alien to the Wild West and so in truth, the maxim should be amended. The wicked flee regardless.

The story, depicts the precocious young girl Mattie Ross, who, with the help of two bounty hunters seeks to avenge her fathers death at the hands of petty criminal Tom Cheney. On the surface she does exactly this, but the vision is fractured. After being bitten by a rattlesnake, she hallucinates her fathers killer. Despite the fact she has killed him with her own hands, he remains yet, an insubstantial shadow riding off into the night. ‘He’s getting away,’ she murmurs. In truth, she herself is being pursued this time by new knowledge, and she cannot escape the fact that her dream of vengeance is an illusion. She has chased only darkness. Whatever beliefs she had are shattered, because she craves a justice that is not of this world. 

Earthly justice fails because it revolves around trade. Ross makes this clear in the first scene. She states: ‘A coward by the name of Tom Cheney shot my father down, and robbed him of his life and his horse, and two Californian gold pieces,’ and quickly follows with, ‘you must pay for everything in this world one way or another.’ The implication is clear. Life itself, is a commodity that can be bartered or frittered away on the market. Even murder becomes just another transaction. Furthermore those who exact such earthly justice, the bounty hunters, bear an uncanny relationship to the outlaws they hunt. Like Cheney, Rooster Cogburn is a thuggish ‘hired man’ and a drunk, who squanders his money. Laboeuf may escape such charges, but the core denominator between bounty hunters and outlaws remains. They both work, and kill, for money. For that matter, so do the other section of societies, including the corrupt merchants and law agencies. There is careful gentleman’s agreement that characterizes such a society, and it is based on exploitation of others. This is why the end scenes are symmetrical. Rooster flogs a horse unto death, while attempting to get Mattie Ross help, effectively exploiting the animal, albeit for a good cause. However, no good deed goes unpunished and the price he must pay for such an act, is to suffer his own exploitation while under a touring rodeo show. Like the horse he is effectively flogged until he dies and this is why old Mattie Ross calls the proprietors of such a company ‘trash.' Money and Power rule such a world, and all men as such are rendered equal because of it.

Rooster Cogburn’s name suggests a masculine world. On the surface rooster suggests prowess and male virility, cogburn blacksmiths and forges. However on a deeper level, cogburn implies a world that has exhausted itself to the point the cogs are burning off the axle, and rooster is a parody of traditional associations. If this is the best of men, what does it say for the worse. Women, on the other hand, are confined to the parlour, and the ignorance of Grandma Turner, and the domestic landlady, who can provide Mattie Ross with ‘an empty flour sack’ to store her gun, but is useless in all other respects. 

Ignorance is bliss and there is even a price to pay for knowledge particularly for women. Rooster Cogburn is missing an eye for his troubles, and how appropriate Mattie Ross looses her arm, the offending agent that held the gun that killed the enemy. Likewise while saddling up, she, feeds her horse little blacky, red apples. The lingering shot of the fruit bowl and stark colours are intriguing and seemingly intentional. Couple this, with the fact that Ross looses her arm to a snakebite, it seems arguable we have an allegorical retelling of Genesis. Mattie Ross is Eve, who plucks the apple of knowledge and falls victim to the tempting serpent. It is also interesting that Tom Cheney declares Ross, broke a rib when she shot him. If we recall Genesis, Eve is made and fashioned out of Adam’s rib. The poetic justice here is that Mattie Ross herself, is also ‘made,' by the man, she bears a kinship too.

For the conclusion we should return to the introduction. ‘The wicked flee and none pursueth.’ Twenty-five years later, Mattie Ross gives a new coming of age maxim: ‘Time just flits away from us.’ There is a symmetry in the end lines, which recalls the opening scenes, and it suggests that wickedness is actually bound up to the human condition. That time itself is the enemy, and life the punishment. The biblical subtext is strong, but the irony is that this is a wicked flawed world without God much like are own. We have come full circle. The Wild West is not that different from ours, and the proverb lingers yet, though shorn in half ‘the wicked flee.’