Retrospective: WALKER (1987) | Attack of the Drive-In!
No, not the Texas Ranger. No, this isn't Ed Harris playing THAT Man in Black. Or that other man in black from Appaloosa.
I cannot help noticing Sir, during the time I've spent with you, that you've betrayed every principle you've had, and all the men who supported you. May I ask why?
No, you may not.
The world of movies is a weird, terrible, beautiful place. For instance, it’s a place where two legends of film criticism — Siskel and Ebert — could give a Daffy Duck movie two thumbs up and utterly destroy an acid western from Alex Cox.
Who’s Alex Cox? Well, you’d probably know if Walker hadn’t tanked his career.
You might know him from Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, but this gem made him infamous. Though, on the upside, it did give Ed Harris an entire career playing black-clad cowboys.
It didn’t do well in the indoor cinema (ew), but this…well, it’s an utter event unto itself. Imagine if, instead of Vietnam, Frank Coppola had decided to set an anti-war-war-movie in Nicaragua in the 1800s, and got incredibly high on acid while coming up with the idea. You’d have something like Walker, but the spirit is uniquely Cox.
Walker’s chances at the box office were also hurt, in part, by the 1986 Best Picture winner, Platoon — a more…traditionally anti-war film. This doesn’t so much take a scalpel to American preconceptions about war — as it takes a 10-pound hammer to it. Cox’s chances for this film were also lessened because it was 1987, after all. It was the era of the Cult of Reagan, with America going toe-to-toe against every presumed evil we could come up with, from Iran to drugs as a whole, to, well, Nicaragua.
To understand the setup to this, you need to understand “why the hell Alex Cox wanted a movie set in Nicaragua, and who the hell is William Walker?”
This Walker wasn’t a Texas Ranger. He was…something else. Unlike the Chuck Norris character, this Walker was a real person. He was a filibuster (a “freebooter,” something like heads of private military companies are today) in the 1850s, and he serves as the very loose basis for this film. It’s billed as a biopic — but don’t go in expecting anything resembling historical accuracy, especially as the film goes on. Cox has a deep, abiding love of anachronisms, and they’re plentiful here. Oddly though, it works well for this take on Walker and his adventures in Nicaragua.
So why Nicaragua? That particular little country has long been eyed by industrialists and American corporations because of a special strategic interest — it’s part of a thin strip of land separating the Atlantic from Pacific Oceans. If you were a shipping magnate, say, having control of the area would mean profits beyond your wildest dreams. You could charge your rivals for the privilege of moving their stuff through a passage you controlled. It wasn’t just the U.S. that had designs on Nicaragua — several other European nations (and their corporations) plotted overthrows of the government with all the mustache-twirling and monologuing you’d expect of cartoon villainy. For no other reason but “cold, hard cash.”
First came Mexico — still heavy into its own imperialist era (ironically, shortly after casting off Spanish imperialism). That marked a turning point for Nicaragua, and the future seemed bright for all of five minutes until revolutionaries split into two factions — the Conservatives and Liberals. Without an entire lesson in geopolitics (though the U.S. definitions have nothing to do with Nicaragua’s realities), this is where William Walker enters the history of our newly-democratic nation. During open conflicts between the two sides, Walker shows up, leading a band of mercenaries fighting for the Liberals, and through a series of events, declares himself president. He runs the country for about a year before he’s kicked out by the people of Nicaragua. But the history — and relevance to this movie (yeah, this is going somewhere) doesn’t stop there. Neither does U.S. intervention.
With the help of the U.S. and corporate interests, the Somoza family comes to power, and rule for about 40 years. The U.S. had managed to occupy the country, and despite being kicked back out — left proxies in its wake. The Somoza era was designed to undermine the then-current military in favor of Somoza loyalists (who would, in turn, be U.S. loyalists). This worked about as well as you’d expect, and by the 1960s, Nicaragua was broke and the Somozas had run virtually everything balls-deep into the ground. That’s no exaggeration of their greed — they stole millions in today’s money in relief aid meant for the people of the Mangua following a massive earthquake.
This is where the Sandinistas come in. Founded in 1961, their whole idea was creating a guerrilla force strong enough to overthrow the Somozas, a socialist organization calling themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front. They were, naturally, labeled as terrorists by both the Nicaraguan Somoza government and the U.S. By 1979, they were able to seize control. The next year, during the Carter administration here in the U.S., “Contras” were formed by the Central Intelligence Agency in the country, purportedly as a response to Sandinista arms sales to El Salvador. The Contras were (far) right-wing Somoza loyalists for the most part, and were provided by the U.S. with arms, military training, and funds to work to overthrow the government again. For perspective — the Contras were known to torture and kill actual babies. Regularly.
Peak discourse for the Contras came in the 1980s, with the Reagan administration funneling insane amounts of U.S. tax money into the Contras via the CIA. Famously, Reagan painted the Contras as kind, pro-democracy freedom fighters, but the truth for Nicaraguans was that they were committing widespread atrocities across the country, and engaging in what amounted to daily war crimes with U.S. government approval (and arming and bankrolling). This came to a head in 1984, with the election of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Party won the country’s elections in a landslide — with the U.S. immediately accusing the government of rigging elections. The U.S. had backed far-right fascist party nationalist Arturo Cruz. Reagan’s own advisors stated that Cruz shouldn’t even run — that they could just claim the elections were rigged afterward anyway.
This came to a head in the Iran-Contra hearings, so named because the U.S. sold weapons to Iran, and using creative accounting, moved the proceeds into accounts held by the Contras, along with weapons and logistical support. During the brutal internal war between the Sandinistas and Contras, at least 30,000 people were confirmed killed. That number goes up to around 50,000 in some estimates.
During the early 80s, U.S. political rhetoric was fixated on labeling the socialist Sandinista government as a failure, causing widespread poverty, and presumably taking government ownership of everyone’s toothbrush and telling kids there’s no Santa. Here’s where Alex Cox comes into the story.
In 1984, Cox visited Nicaragua to see, functionally, what all the fuss was about. He wondered if how the media was portraying the situation in the U.S. and in his native England was accurate. He found that it wasn’t. The Sandinistas had done much to provide aid to the poor and raise standards of living — despite their ongoing conflict with the Contras. Speaking to natives, he was told that the only reason they struggled with rebuilding the country — was interference from the Contras themselves. From here, Cox looked deeper into the history of the country and found William Walker — a man obsessed with the “Great Man,” ideology and the idea of Manifest Destiny. So he did what any red-blooded Englishman would do about it — he decided he’d make a cowboy movie about it.
Cox’s entire body of work speaks to his fascination with the American West. Walker is very much a western in imagery and spirit. It’s entirely an acid western. His is part of a particular genre of movies called the “revisionist western.” That’s less intense than it sounds. It just means that the black and white (hat) morality required by the Hays Code no longer applied to westerns — and the New Hollywood era of Easy Rider, Taxi Driver and other counterculture darlings were now able to blend with the Old West.
This is one of the first movies to blatantly rail against the mythology of the West — and, most importantly, Manifest Destiny itself.
You see, Walker (Ed Harris) in this movie is Cox’s walking embodiment of Manifest Destiny. He uses the character to deconstruct Manifest Destiny and the Great Man idea (and I use “idea” generously). Cox uses Walker to illustrate an utterly absurd (outside your average Tarantino joint) body count and subverts a lot of tropes of war movies (both pro- and anti-war — he specifically dodges any sort of remorse that, say, Platoon fed on). Cox’s acid-fueled polemic serves to outline the U.S.’s longstanding interests in the region, and the real reason behind it — largely the interests of large corporations. That interest in played here by Cornelius Vanderbilt. In real life, Walker didn’t work for Vanderbilt. He was employed by Vandy’s competitors: Charles Morgan and Cornelius Garrison. The pair were co-owners of the Nicaragua Transit Company during the time — a glorified war chest for securing American interests.
Walker is rightfully called satire, if heavy-handed. The monied interests of Vanderbilt only fuel Walker’s self-righteous sense of destiny and immortality that lead him and a band of mercenaries into Nicaragua. In the movie, Cox illustrates how cyclical this entire concept is — by interspersing then-modern products and imagery (like Diet Coke, for example, or more modern automatic rifles used by the mercenaries). He hammers this home in the final scene — a montage of Reagan’s speeches, drawing a direct line between the 1980s and the 1850s.
It’s a bleak, dark, biting social satire disguised as a film about Ed Harris drinking Diet Coke. It has Peckinpahesque slow-mo shooty-shooty scenes, with Harris slow-walking through the carnage (give the man credit — no one does those scenes like Ed Harris). Not a necessarily “funny,” movie, it’s satirical in the way Swift demanding we eat babies was satirical.
Cox draws liberally from both films like the Rambo series, bits of Apocalypse Now, and the old white-hat cowboys of the Old West (including a nod to this, just as Westworld would later — by dressing Harris in all black). His direction makes the world feel increasingly warped, distorted, and sitting-askew more as the film goes on.
But it was so poorly received that it nearly destroyed Cox’s career. Part of the reason was that he’d chosen to use much of the money the studio gave him to help the Nicaraguan people rebuild. Universal was unhappy with the final product — and presumably his use of their $6 million — saying it was too political and too violent for them to promote. So, simply, they didn’t promote it. Walker had a very limited release and no real marketing campaign behind it, and it’s been, to date, Cox’s biggest bomb.
Does it stand up? Absolutely. The messages of the dangers of would-be Great Men and manifest destiny are all too relevant even today, as is the U.S. interventionism and the influence corporate and financial interests play in politics.
It’s a movie that deserves a watch, and a reappraisal. It doesn’t hurt that it’s also a blast to munch popcorn to, while watching Ed Harris cowboy-fu his way around Nicaragua.
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