Anna Kerrigan | Cowboys / 2020

cowboys: i’m not peggy lee

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anna Kerrigan (screenwriter and director) Cowboys / 2020

 

In many respects, Kerrigan’s first feature film Cowboys serves as a model of the issues upon which I focusing in this larger essay on delusion and denial. This film, set in rural Montana, where Kerrigan also spent some periods of her childhood, concerns what might have been a normative heterosexual and conservative couple were it not for two crucial matters. The husband, Troy (a wonderful Steve Zahn decked out with a rough billy-goat-like beard) gets into trouble simply from over-reacting to the fact that his brother’s boy has been spying on Troy’s daughter as she tries on a new cowboy outfit. He almost beats the child and when his brother tries to intervene, he brawls with him as well, turning the peaceful clothes outing into a violent setting that might have more logically been played out in an isolated bar.

     Clearly, like so many of his kind, the man-boy Troy actually sees himself as a kind of western figure protecting womenkind. And he is locked-up for his own arrested-development. But what he doesn’t know is that he is also suffering from bi-polar disorder, which helps to transform even some of his best attempts to be a lover to his wife and parent to his child into sudden outbursts of over-enthusiasm unpermitted in the necessarily ordered world that has overtaken this former frontier wilderness in just a few decades.

     Secondly, what we also gradually discover is that a different series of events have sundered Troy’s relationship with his wife Sally (Jillian Bell) beginning with their daughter’s announcement that she is not a girl but now a male forced to wear long hair and dresses by her loving but clueless mother. Like most Americans she simply has no context into she can catalogue her daughter’s sudden belief that she doesn’t belong in the body into which she was born.

      One of the most loving scenes of this film, in fact, is Sally’s attempt to explain to Joe (Sasha Knight, a young transexual actor) that you don’t get a choice about what body you’re born into. She recounts a story [which I’ll restate words from my own memory] about how when she was a child her mother loved the singer Peggy Lee, playing her music day and night. Sally suggests that she herself wanted to be Peggy Lee, to be as beautiful as she was in her early years and to sing like her mother’s hero. But here I am, she summarizes, not looking anything like Peggy Lee and I can’t sing for shit. “I’m not Peggy Lee.”

     As she shouts at Troy in one of their arguments, I cook and clean, I work to pay for our food. And I’m tired. “Who would choose to be a girl?”

    For Troy, on the other hand, once he gets over the momentary shock of his blonde long-haired daughter’s declaration of her gender shift, he sees it is as something simply to be accepted. Besides, we perceive, it allows him the perfect opportunity to live out his childhood once again, this time with a son at his side with whom he might share his wonderment of the natural world he so loves and which, in the increasingly urbanized world in which he lives, has almost been lost.

     Kerrigan’s film begins, in fact, with a poignantly beautiful landscape spread out before him and his now short-haired son, with him declaring “It’s so pretty it’s almost too much.” In fact, he has just kidnapped Joe, suggesting to him that they are about to set out on a short camping trip into Canada where the mountains, the trees, the fish, everything is much bigger than it is even in the back country of Montana.

   Despite the fact that he is now taking pills to regulate his excessive visions of what he can accomplish, we already suspect and soon have it reconfirmed that the voyage he and Joe are planning is not a short-lived outing, but a permanent escape into a neverland that even Joe begins to recognize is utterly impossible to enter.

       Already Sally has discovered that her daughter has escaped through the window and has notified the police that her husband has kidnapped her. She does not, however, explain to the local Detective Faith Erickson (Ann Dowd) that Joe has chopped her own away long curls and she/he is not dressed in a skirt as in the photo she has provided, but is dressed in jeans, cowboy shirt, and cowboy hat. By the time the general warnings of a kidnapped girl have gone out, moreover, Troy’s truck has broken down and he and Joe have stolen a friend’s horse, now turning the long chase at the center of this film into a kind of 21st-century western trail yarn in which the two of them have now become outlaws of a sort.

       Kerrigan skillfully demonstrates the problem of both parents with the fact that they cannot even identify their child or one another through the same language: for the father he is rationally undertaking a voyage into the back country with his son, while the mother sees only a madman who has stolen off with her daughter. If Joe seems often quiet and confused, one can only imagine the chaos rushing into this handsome child’s head. To be what he wants to be he can only move forward, while still recognizing that any reality exists only from where he has come from. Space itself becomes a labyrinth pushing and pulling him from any course he may wish to choose for himself.

      And like any cowboy living more than a century after such now-mythological creatures truly existed, Troy has not planned well. With most of their foodstuffs gone, Joe awakens in the night  in order to surprise his father with a fresh-caught fish, but nearly drowns in the process, Troy pulling the boy to safety after he thought he might have already lost his child to the rapids. What he lost is his medicine, and with it any attempts at a sane trek to the Canadian border and beyond.

      Besides, by this time Erickson and the federal police have already closed off the border and are seeking the outlaws, particularly since a stranger heard in a nearby thicket has been shot in the leg by the nervous inexperienced gunman, Joe.

       It is only at this moment we recognize that the duo, now lost and designated as dangerous, might become yet another instance of trigger-happy policemen mistakenly gunning them down. Erickson is almost able to lure them into calm as she prepares to cross the river in order to bring them to safely; but, just as we might have expected, a shot rings out and Troy is downed.

       The director, however, is too clever to allow her film to end with a stale trope. Troy survives, to be locked up once more, while Sally, finally recognizing that she has been wrong in her resistance to the inevitable, has gone out and bought her child, now soon to enter puberty, the toy guns and holsters, the cowboy books, and all else that she had once denied her pleading son got up in long hair and gown.

       Clearly, it’s not going to be easy for Joe to live out his teenage years within the normative society in which his mother remains, but at least the previous denials of her mother and, hopefully, the delusions of her father have been put to rest. Joe finally has a space in which he himself must now learn to live. Yet it’s still difficult not to recall that this is also the territory of the cowboys of Brokeback Mountain (filmed just across the border to where Joe and his father were headed) and in nearby Wyoming (one state below) Matthew Shepard was beaten and died for being gay.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).