American Samurai Vol:3

Braveheart Edition.

No, William Wallace is not American.

No, Braveheart is not remotely historically accurate.

I don’t care and neither should you. Here at the Slaughter House, I make the rules, and William Wallace, or more accurately Mel Gibson’s portrayal of him in Braveheart has been given honorary American Samurai status. Besides being one of the best films ever made and the peak of Mel’s acting and directing, there is something uniquely American about Braveheart. Despite the fact that it takes place in the Scottish Highlands hundreds of years before America is founded, it has that rugged individualism that defines the most American of figures, the cowboy.

In many ways, William Wallace is a cowboy because he embodies the archetypal heroic nature of a cowboy. It could be the overlap of the values of the Scottish highlander and the American cowboy, or the residue of Scottish culture being felt in America. It seems ridiculous, William Wallace the cowboy, if I am going to make claims like that, I should explain how I see the American cowboy in terms of myth and archetypes before I start mixing metaphors.  

The cowboy is to Americans, what the samurai is to the Japanese, the knight is to the English, or the highlander is to Scotland. He is the archetypal hero, a mythological creation formed by the culmination of their shared values, projected in a form uniquely crafted from the self-image of each culture. For America, the archetypal hero takes the form of the cowboy.

It is important to understand the distinction between forms and their representation in reality. If you have not familiarized yourself with the platonic idea of forms, now would be a good time to do so. If not, I will provide a quick explanation. 

In your mind, you have the idea or form of a cowboy, if you close your eyes, you can picture him. The cowboy of your mind is abstract, he is all cowboys and no particular cowboy. In reality, the cowboy can vary in size, and hair color, he can be from Colorado or Texas, but he is the representation of the form of a cowboy in reality. You know a cowboy when you see one because he represents the form of a cowboy. in addition, there is also the abstract quality of the form so a person or thing can have a cowboy-ness without being a cowboy.

If that didn’t make sense, I’m sorry. I’m not a philosophy teacher and you didn’t come here for armchair philosophy. You are welcome to turn back anytime.

If you are still here, we have the form of a cowboy, which is the basis of our archetypal American hero. The archetypical part is, in essence, all those qualities that would be ideal for a cowboy all rolled into one individual. They may even take physical form; I would argue that the chivalric code or the bushido code (to keep with our knight and samurai example) are these ideal heroic characteristics (or archetypes) written down or even legalized. For Americans, this may be John Wayne’s or Clint Eastwood’s portrayals of a cowboy. The code their characters lived by (in most films) embodied the unwritten code of the cowboy.

So, each culture has its unique archetypal heroic form. The heroic form is the aggregate of all heroic qualities most valued by a given culture and crafted in their self-image. The stories that a culture tells to communicate that form and how it acts out the heroic values become the myths that define them. These myths at their core tell us how ideally that form navigates the world.

The archetypal heroic myth of the cowboy is (more often than not), a man who has gone west in the wake of the Civil War looking to start over. He puts his violent past to bed and begins with the help of a woman, to enjoy a quiet life. He is thrust into conflict after the loss of a loved one at the hands of a tyrannical authority. He is joined by others who have been terrorized by the same tyrannical authority and is reluctantly thrown into the role of hero. Once he accepts this role nothing short of dying will stop him from seeing justice and order restored.

Okay, now, how do William Wallace and Braveheart fit in here? Well, if you read the above paragraph, you now know the basic synopsis of Braveheart. I am not going to give you a rundown of the plot points. If you have seen it, you already know, if you haven’t then stop and go watch it now.  If you have seen the film then you will recognize  William Wallace’s story in, many western classics such as High Plains Drifter, Hang‘Em High, The Shootist, etc.

The cowboy is the archetypal hero of founding stock America, his stories are the myths bringing to life the conflict between the ideal hero and a flawed world. When we hear stories or watch movies about cowboys, we are watching our ideal heroic form, we are seeing ourselves as we want to be seen and as we want the world to view us. The cowboy is all that is good in our culture fighting to stay good in a wicked world. 

Watching Braveheart, it is easy to see the cowboy-ness in its themes, Wallace is self-reliant, honest, brave, and loyal, he is a reluctant hero, and a good friend. He values freedom and peace. When forced to fight he sees it to the end. He is a cowboy, an American samurai, or maybe the Scottish immigrants brought their archetypal hero with them and that spirit lives in us, maybe the Cowboy is an American highlander?

-TJ Slaughter

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