{"id":16046,"date":"2018-04-20T08:44:05","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T12:44:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=16046"},"modified":"2018-04-18T14:44:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T18:44:28","slug":"eric-mottram-on-triggernometry-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/eric-mottram-on-triggernometry-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Eric Mottram on Triggernometry (4)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

IV<\/b><\/p>\n

The reality and fantasy of Billy the Kid contain the social issues. Sam Peckinpah\u2019s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid <\/i>(1973) needed Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson to attract a public, and in 1974 Dirty Little Billy, <\/i>starring the radically unheroic Michael J. Pollard, was advertized at the Hiram College, Ohio, cinema Under the rubric: \u2018Billy the Kid was a Punk.\u2019 But by this time Hollywood had made twenty-three Kid movies. Blue-eyed Paul Newman plays the right-handed Kid as a hero in Arthur Penn\u2019s The Left Handed Gun <\/i>(1958), finally dying on a cross of wagon Shafts. In The Law and Billy the Kid <\/i>(1954), which features Scott Brady as the Kid and James Griffith as Garrett, Billy is shot by one of the sheriff\u2019s men while escaping from a visit to his girl Mend at Maxwell\u2019s house. David Miller\u2019s Billy the Kid <\/i>(1941) has Robert Taylor in the leading role. A 1961 TV series, entitled Robin Hood of the Southwest, <\/i>co-starred Garrett and the Kid, with the latter as a Casanova. Walter Noble Burns\u2019 The <\/i>Saga of Billy the Kid <\/i>(1926) transfixed the legends into the formaldehyde of a believer\u2019s handbook, and slipped easily into King Vidor\u2019s MGM film of 1930, also called Billy the Kid, <\/i>which starred Johnny Mack Brown, former AU-American footballer . . . Aaron Copland\u2019s music for Lincoln Kerstein\u2019s American Ballet Caravan production in 1938 was part a larger effort during the Depression to create indigenous forms of dance and music. As Wilfred Mellers observes: \u2018By far the nastiest music is given to Society,\u201d \u201cpublic values\u201d conflict with the fulfillment of private life,\u2019 and the music finally makes the Kid \u2018a tragic figure.\u201946<\/sup><\/p>\n

Facts about the Kid are not easily obtained. The most reliable source is Kent Ladd Steckmesser\u2019s The Western Hero in History <\/i>and Legend <\/i>(1965), in which we see the legend as cover for historical fact, and the legendary figure fusing politics and economics as the desire to be freed from their necessity. The western hero emerges at the intersection of the economy and popular media, themselves already permeated with a belief in permissive conquest as laissez-faire <\/i>in action and lawlessness as natural birthright. John Smith, authoritarian leader of the Jamestown settlement and ruthless manipulator of Indians, becomes the hero of the armchair speculator \u2018back East\u2019 in England. Daniel Boone, \u2019employee of North Carolina land speculators,\u2019 farmer and hunter ejected from his land by lawsuits, becomes the epic founder of Kentucky and the embodiment of man\u2019s natural movement across space and into the White God\u2019s wilderness. Incompetence in law and business drove Boone west. Law, business, and literature turned him into an executor of the natural, with all its attendant permissions. Steckmesser quotes his resentment: \u2018Nothing embitters my old age but the circulation of the absurd and ridiculous stories that I retire as civilization advances; that I shun the white man and seek the Indians. . . . You know all this false. Poverty and enterprise excited me to quit my native state, and poverty and despair my native land.\u201947<\/sup> The Boones may have been fearless leaders of westward-moving settlers but they were also part of the exploitative conquest that is the economics of epic.<\/p>\n

Billy the Kid was part of both the economics and the fantasy, turned into a stereotypical killer through the agency of the revolver. He lived out the type in the middle of that short period of the West\u2019s history exploited by the arts as the Western: V. . from about 1865 to 1890 or so, a brief final instant in the process. This twilight era was a momentous one: within just its span we can count a number of frontiers in the sudden rash of mining camps, the building of the railways, the Indian Wars, the cattle drives, the coming of the farmer. Together with the last days of the Civil War and the exploits of the bad men, here is the raw material of the western.\u201948<\/sup><\/p>\n

The legendary Kid is a champion shot down in a cowardly \u2022manner; the real Kid has been called \u2018a nineteen-year-old, unpreposessing little assassin.\u201949<\/sup> The facts lie somewhere in-between. The context includes bad men who went bad \u2018by a process which the West regarded as respectfully as it did religious conversion.\u2019 Robbing banks and trains, shooting it out with the law and dying with their boots on, such men were examples of a predatory age quite as much as Jim Fiske and Jay Gould, the financial speculators, \u2018but rather more easily sentimentalized.\u2019 In 1863, William C. Quantrill, operating with his guerrillas under a Confederate captaincy, killed a thousand people and burned numerous buildings, yet the folk ballad says:<\/p>\n

Oh, Quantrill\u2019s a fighter, a bold-hearted boy,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A brave man or woman he\u2019ll never annoy,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He\u2019ll take from the wealthy and give to the poor,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For brave men there\u2019s never a bolt to his door.50<\/sup><\/p>\n

Billy the Kid, who scared the land-grant potentates of New Mexico, and Jesse James, who robbed the Mid-Western banking and railroad elite, naturally became proletarian heroes. McMurphy undergoes a similar elevation for attacking the combine in Ken Kesey\u2019s One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest <\/i>(1962). The Kid\u2019s reputed birth, in New York City on 23 November 1859, is based on a newspaperman\u2019s statement.51<\/sup> At the age of three, he left the tenement slum, with his parents, for Kansas. He was certainly in Santa Fe when his mother married for the second time in March, 1873. His father was called William H. Bonney and his mother\u2019s maiden name was Catherine McCarty. Catherine\u2019s second husband, William Antrim, was a silver miner with whom she moved from Colorado to Silver City, New Mexico, in about 1868 (a photograph shows him in front of the Confidence Mine, New Mexico, in the 1890s). In the Southwest, Billy picked up the saga of desperadoes like Jesse James, any boy\u2019s folk heroes of the 1870s, and learned to use a Colt and a Winchester. Catherine died in 1874, leaving young William H. Bonney, now also known as Henry McCarthy and Henry Antrim, to fend for himself. The following year he was arrested for theft, and two years later killed a blacksmith in some petty feud (legend says he was twelve and defending his mother against an insult \u2013 hence his infantilization into the Kid for the rest of his life). Legend: under siege in a ranch-house he saved his protectress\u2019s piano from flames as she played \u2018The Star-Spangled Banner.\u2019 Legend: he killed twenty-one men in his twenty-one years, \u2018not counting Indians,\u2019 as Burns writes in his credulous Saga.<\/i>52<\/sup><\/i> <\/i>Antrim left Arizona for Mesilla, New Mexico, where in 1877 he was spotted with a gang of rustlers. He escaped to Lincoln County and through his friend George Coe met John Tunstall, who hired him to work on his large ranch. Tunstall also owned a store in Lincoln, and together with his partner, Alexander McSween, a lawyer, was financed by John S. Chisum, cattle baron. In the \u2018Lincoln County War\u2019 they were opposed by the Murphy-Dolan-Riley ranching-trading combine, which was itself backed by the \u2018Santa Fe Ring,\u2019 a powerful monopoly out to control those traders and small farmers represented by Tunstall and McSween. So the Kid was once justified by his boss: \u2018Most of those he did kill deserved what they got.\u201953<\/sup><\/p>\n

In fact, the gang war obviated justice and justification. As Tunstall remarked in 1877: \u2018Everything in New Mexico that pays at all\u2026 is worked by a \u201cring.\u201d \u2026 I am at work at present making such a ring and I have succeeded admirably so far.\u2019 Lincoln County in those days had neither railroad nor barbed wire nor any effective law. It was largely a public domain occupied by settlers, gunslingers (who certainly lacked the sentimentality and wit of Edward Dorn\u2019s hero), and feuding cattlemen. The Kid seems to have been hired by both sides in their battle for land rights and economic power. Legend: Billy said of Tunstall, \u2018he was the only man that ever trusted me like I was free-born and white.\u2019 Legend: Tunstall said of Billy \u2018that\u2019s the finest lad I ever met. He\u2019s a revelation to me every day and would do anything on earth to please me. I\u2019m going to make a man out of that boy yet.\u201954<\/sup> Whether the mutual devotion of English gentleman rancher and American farmboy is true or not, the Kid\u2019s need to avenge Tunstall\u2019s murder by the Murphy mob in 1878 seems to be authenticated. At Tunstall\u2019s grave he reportedly said: \u2018I\u2019ll get every son-of-a-bitch who helped kill John if it\u2019s the last thing I do,\u2019 and \u2018I never expect to let up until I kill the last man who helped kill Tunstal or die in the act myself.\u2019 His furious, vindictive temper became well-known.<\/p>\n

The Murphy-Dolan group were powerful enough to make Governor Axtell obtain US troops to defend their interests. The McSweens turned to assassination, and the Kid was regularly named as a killer in reports of the war. On 15 July 1878 they fried to capture Lincoln township, and were defeated after a major shoot-out in Lincoln Plaza and at the McSween fortress-ranch. The boss died, the war was over, and the Kid escaped to the outlaw trail. In Fort Sumner he first met Pat Garrett, then barman in the Beaver Smith saloon. The Kid stole horses from the Chisums in lieu of wages owed, and reassumed the name of Bonney. The President had heard of the shoot-out, as had the new Governor, Lew Wallace, then writing Ben Hur. <\/i>The 1879 Lincoln County War amnesty did not apply to the Kid because he was charged with the murder of William Brady, the Murphy-Dolan sheriff, in 1878; so he wrote to the Governor offering to Surrender and gain freedom by testifying against the killers of Huston I. Chapman, Mrs. McSweeney\u2019s one-armed lawyer. At the rendezvous, Billy faced Wallace with a Winchester in his right hand and a revolver in his left. He was about nineteen. He lived well in captivity, betraying numerous badmen and being serenaded by the locals. The legend was under way. But Wallace failed to obtain the pardon, and did not put him on trial. The Kid broke jail. In 1880 he killed Joe Grant and Jim Carlyle. The press wanted his blood and blamed him for leading every gang \u2013 and it is clear he could lead.<\/p>\n

Pat Garrett had worked as cowhand, buffalo hunter, and horse-wrangler for Peter Maxwell, who had also once employed the Kid. In 1880, when he was twenty-eight, Garrett married Polinaria Guiterrey (they had seven children) and the cattle barons elected him sheriff of Lincoln County. It is said that the Kid befriended Garrett on his arrival in Lincoln \u2013 hence the latter\u2019s Judas image. In November 1880 Garrett ambushed the Kid at Fort Sumner, but the Kid got away to shoot it out at a deserted farmhouse in Stinking Springs. There he surrendered, along with three allies, after which Garrett took him to Las Vegas, where the Gazette <\/i>interviewed him: \u2018[H]e looked and acted a mere boy \u2026 a frank open countenance, looking like a school boy, with the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip. . . . He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, the only imperfection being two prominent front teeth slightly protruding like squirrel\u2019s teeth, and he has agreeable and winning ways\u2019.55<\/sup><\/p>\n

From jail he had written appealing to Wallace, but the Governor simply released their correspondence to avoid possible scandal. He was tried for Brady\u2019s murder at Mesilla in March 1881, the only Lincoln War criminal to be tried and sentenced. (The Kid was to be hung.) He escaped by killing his two guards, one of whom, Robert W. Ollinger, was an ex-gunthrower. Apparently he used a six-shooter hidden in the privy by friends and a Winchester nicked from the prison armoury. His reputation as a ruthless killer was sealed, but he did not attempt to escape to Mexico \u2013 one reason may have been a love affair (one name mentioned is \u2018Dulcinea del Toboso\u2019). To regain any status at all, Garrett had to capture him once and for all. After a three month hunt, he found the Kid at the Maxwell house, half-dressed in the darkness, and shot him down from the head of Maxwell\u2019s bed with Maxwell in it, it is said, as Billy entered the bedroom. Neither Garrett nor his deputies could have been sure it was the Kid until Maxwell whispered it was him. It is not clear whether he had only a knife on him or a six-shooter \u2013 some reports say he had both. In his report to Wallace, Garrett said that he had wanted him alive but that the Kid had come onto him suddenly, armed to kill. He shot before being shot.<\/p>\n

In the context of frontier life, a daily battle for existence where killing was the common outcome of any quarrel and inter-ranch warfare was standard, the Kid\u2019s possible five murders out of the legendary twenty-one is small.55<\/sup> Frederick Law Olmstead, an early traveller through Texas, wrote that an inventory of the Colt revolvers owned in the state would approximate in numbers the census of the adult males. When W.W. Mills, brother of Brigadier-General Anson Mills of cartridge-belt fame, came to El Paso in 1858, every male citizen regardless of age or vocation took his six-shooter from beneath his pillow the first thing in the morning, and wore it until he went to bed again.<\/p>\n

Garrett lost his badge when the Democrats refused his renomination, and he had to hire a lawyer to get the 500 dollars reward from Wallace. He then went into various ranching concerns, developed a distaste for guns, got a job from President Theodore Roosevelt as customs collector at El Paso, and ended up raising horses. He was killed in a row over property in 1908, and his grave is unmarked: no tombstone and no steel fence to keep off souvenir hunters, unlike the Kid\u2019s grave at Fort Sumner. A year after he had killed the Kid, on 14 July 1881, he brought out his AuthenticLife of Billy the Kid, <\/i>in order to promote his victory. But by then the legend had thickened. The Philadelphia Times <\/i>had quickly seen the Kid as a cruel sexy leader of two or three hundred men, dressed in Ruritanian quasi-military gear, born in Ireland, and living in an adobe castle. Two dime novels on his career appeared in 1881.57<\/sup> In John Woodruff Lewis\u2019s True Life of Billy the Kid, <\/i>he signs a writ with the blood of two victims and \u2018with the laugh of a demon.\u2019 In Edmund Fable\u2019s The New Mexican Outlaw <\/i>he wears the now customary black buckskin trousers and jewelled hat. In J.C. Cowdrick\u2019s Silver Mask <\/i>(1884) he wears \u2018a rich Mexican suit.\u2019 Curiously enough, it is Garrett\u2019s book (ghosted by Ash Upson) which began the softening of outlaw into victim of family and society, a Clyde Griffiths without the chemistry of cowardice in Dreiser\u2019s An American Tragedy <\/i>(1925). Upson, an imaginative New Mexico newspaperman and once a boarder at the Antrims\u2019, needed the legend nearly as much as Garrett, who wrote in his introduction: \u2018The truth, in the life of young Bonney, needs no pen dipped in blood to thrill the heart and stay its pulsation. This verified history of the Kid\u2019s exploits, with all the exaggerations removed, will exhibit him as the peer of any fabled brigand on record, unequalled in his desperate courage, presence of mind, devotion to his allies, generosity to his foes, gallantry, and all the elements which appeal to the holier emotions Hence the sacred insulted mother and, in Siringo, the opening killing of\u2019a Negro soldier at Fort Union\u2019 (this book was a best-seller until 1926). But the Kid still had to massacre and rob three Apache Indians and various Mexicans in Sonora and Chihuahua, rescue Texans from Apaches with the James gang, take on twenty \u2018well-armed savages\u2019 in the Guadelupe Mountains with only his six-gun and a dirk, and so on. Garrett-Upson says he was \u2018polite, cordial and gentlemanly\u2019 and cursed in \u2018the most elegant phraseology.\u2019 The farm boy had vanished. In Walter Woods\u2019 1903 play, it is the Kid\u2019s father who is the villain, exonerated by being killed in mistake for his son, who thereupon starts a new life \u2018where the sun shines always.\u201959<\/sup> In 1925 Harvey Furgusson reinforced the Robin Hood association \u2013 \u2018he befriended the poor\u2019 \u2013 and folklorists ever since have used him to transpose other world myths into American form: Hercules, Faust, Ulysses and other versions of the Clever Hero. He is the little guy in a baron\u2019s war, too; a champion of the nonideological: betrayed, shot down, and resurrected.<\/p>\n

It is the stereotypical killer, the unchanging star of myth, which Michael McClure dramatizes in his plays and poems about Billy the Kid. In The Blossom <\/i>(1967), Billy moves between Tunstall and Susan and Alexander McSween as part of McClure\u2019s involvement in Antonin Artaud and the acte gratuit <\/i>of liberation, the hallucinatory sensation of free action, and the absolute centre of outlawry in madness, the insanity of utter isolation. The play is reprinted in The Mammals <\/i>(1972) along with a section of documents including a tintype of Billy and photographs of Tunstall and the McSweens. The Beard <\/i>(1965) and The Sermons of Jean Harlow and the Curses of Billy the Kid <\/i>(1968) connect the stereotypical gunman with the fixed star of an exploitative Hollywood as repetitive and sterile expressions of American society: partly pathetic, partly monstrous.60<\/sup><\/p>\n

In an essay written on the occasion of a reprint of Burns\u2019 uncritical biography in 1953, Charles Olson criticizes those who take Billy as \u2018mere killer\u2019 and do not overhear in \u2018the Kid\u2019s question \u201cQuien es<\/a>?\u201d (with Pat Garrett sitting at the foot of the bed, in the blackness), why El Chivato asked anything, this once, instead of barking, with his gun.\u2019 Olson believes Burns\u2019 account \u2013 \u2018The Kid had not fired a shot. He lay with his gun still clutched in his left hand and, in his right, Celsa Gutierrez\u2019s kitchen butcher knife\u2019 \u2013 but ambivalently insists that the duty of fiction is to include the \u2018totality\u2019 of history if the characters are not to be \u2018diminished.\u201961<\/sup> Even less interested in ascertaining the Context of the myth is the fifth of Louis Zukofsky\u2019s \u2018Songs of Degrees,\u2019 in which the skill of William Carlos Williams provides an analogue for the Kid\u2019s abilities: \u2018The kid \/ shoots \/ to \/ kill,\u2019 \u2018the kid\u2019s \/ self sacrifice,\u2019 \u2018one \/ sound: \/ the kid \/ \u2018s torn, \/ shot,\u2019 and so on.62<\/sup> Edward Dorn\u2019s Gunslinger <\/i>(1968) begins in the historical location:<\/p>\n

I met in Mesilla<\/p>\n

The Cautious Gunslinger<\/p>\n

of impeccable personal smoothness<\/p>\n

and slender leather encased hands<\/p>\n

folded casually<\/p>\n

to make his knock . . .<\/p>\n

But then the gunman rapidly undergoes metamorphosis into Theseus, an \u2018equilibrium\u2019 whose myth is order itself, and a solar god who is man\u2019s projection of the single winner. Michael Ondaatje\u2019s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid <\/i>(1970) is a less sentimentally mythical compilation of poems and prose towards \u2018his legend a jungle sleep.\u2019 The vision of killing and loneliness is accurate (although the Kid materials rely on Burns), but Deputy John W. Poe\u2019s 1919 account of Garrett enables Ondaatje to write: \u2018Pat Garrett, ideal assassin. Public figure, the mind of a doctor. . . . Ideal assassin for his mind was unwarped. . . . One who has decided what was right and forgot all morals.\u2019<\/p>\n

Concerning the Kid, Ondaatje\u2019s Pat Garrett recalls: \u2018[H]e never used his left hand for anything except of course to shoot. He wouldn\u2019t even pick up a mug of coffee. I saw the hand, it was virgin white\u2026. He said he did finger exercises subconsciously, On the average 12 hours a day. \u2026 I noticed his left hand churning within itself.\u201963<\/sup><\/p>\n

Robert Warshow\u2019s 1954 essay \u2018The Westerner\u2019 begins where mythicization must begin: with the gun held by the man, fantasies of the gun, and the importance in both western and gangster mythology of \u2018guns in the fantasy life of Americans.\u201964 <\/sup>Where the gun is an instrument of self-fulfillment and personal justice on both sides of the law, the willingness to shoot is central. The courage of armed men is like the courage of men under martial law so completely examined in Melville\u2019s White Jacket <\/i>(1850): the morality is intersected by coercion. The sheriff and the outlaw are united by their mutual willingness to fire. As Warshow points out: \u2018What [the gunman] defends, at bottom, is the purity of his own image \u2013 in fact his honor. This is what makes him invulnerable.\u2019 Defence of honour within the group described by Webb in 1931 becomes an extreme defence against anonymity, a life of labour, a life without gun-power or indeed power of any kind. Reluctance to use a gun becomes the crux for determining courage and cowardice, power and impotence, and it is in these terms that the stereotype takes over and rigidifies a man into a gunman. (In The Beard, <\/i>Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid exist in an eternity of rigid cultural roles; they have become myths, partly during their actual lifetimes). The westerner\u2019s values cannot really be extended out of the West. In Warshow\u2019s words: \u2018Those values are in the image of a single man who wears a gun on his thigh. The gun tells us that he lives in a world of violence, and even that he \u201cbelieves in violence.\u201d But the drama is one of self-restraint: the moment of violence must come in its own time and according to its special laws, or else it is valueless.\u2019<\/p>\n

As William Burroughs says of his own highly mythical fictions: \u2018None of the characters in my mythology are free. If they were free they would not still be in the mythological system, that is, the cycle of conditioned action\u2019.65<\/sup><\/p>\n

Conditioned action, mythicization and addiction enclose a man in a required role that requisitions his liberty. The myth-user varies the stereotypes but can never fail to expose both the historical actuality and his own preoccupations. In Sam Peckinpah\u2019s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, <\/i>at least in the version shown in Britain, the feud with Chisum (the cattle baron who employs sadist henchmen) is largely cut, and what remains is a clear nostalgia for manliness defined through guns and male contact. Two men shooting it out to the death is a wierd image of comradeship, a mythical ritual universalized through movies. Garrett refuses to be hired by Chisum and Billy too has to evade such a grouping. The audience is the product of a hundred years\u2019 exploitation of land and labour through guns, law and lawlessness. Language is reduced to signals of loyalty, contempt or oppression; the silence is filled by mythic ritual. We compose the film for ourselves out of the group memory of the myth.<\/p>\n

Garrett reappears in Billy\u2019s life at the point where peace, or rather cold war, has reduced killers to shooting off the heads of chickens. Both Billy and Garrett need the kind of challenge Which enables them to establish their manhood in a region whose thin opportunities make for the extreme situation of the fight, <\/b>a common condition of enclosed societies unable to envisage any other way out. Glory is the prize; the ascent is simplified and appeals to those who fantasize life as the pressure of a finger on a trigger. Billy and Pat are boys who Share this adoration, and when Garrett says \u2018It feels like times have changed,\u2019 what he means is \u2018Leave me out of it.\u2019 The interior issue, as usual, is suicide, the death of complex life, the welcoming of a simple absolute. When Billy\u2019s two companions allow themselves to be casually shot up, all that\u2019s said is: \u2018Time to take a walk? Hell, yes!\u2019 Billy opens his arms to embrace Garrett, death, and his own self-sacrifice or suicide. His guards, too, accept death, smiling with self-satisfaction because they have achieved the only glory available. Of Garrett\u2019s two deputies, Pickens clasps his wounds and dies by a sunset river with calm acceptance, and Elam is totally unsurprised to discover that Billy had cheated him from the first; the children and <\/b>the mother watch the ritual of his end in silence, as immobile <\/b>as the audience and the myth. The film is authentic but your response will be governed by whether you believe Peckinpah\u2019s grotesques retain any value beyond their expert repetition of mythic ritual. The presence of Bob Dylan, a major figure <\/b>of the American Movement of the 1960s, and the casting of Kris Kristoffersen as Billy suggest that both the sacrifice and the glory may survive into the present. Peckinpah\u2019s previous film, <\/b>The Getaway <\/i>(1972), and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid <\/i>indicate a director hooked on the manliness of gunning. In The Getaway, <\/i>McQueen does what the advertisements insist is a man\u2019s job in a man\u2019s world: blasting gang rivals and police cars in order to extricate himself with as large a haul as possible. Peckinpah\u2019s fascination ultimately lies in the conjunction of a man with his instruments of manliness, courage and victory \u2013 especially the gun.<\/p>\n

[ctd.]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IV The reality and fantasy of Billy the Kid contain the social issues. Sam Peckinpah\u2019s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) needed Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson to attract a public, and in...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,42],"tags":[308],"class_list":["post-16046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-essays","tag-eric-mottram"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16046"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16050,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16046\/revisions\/16050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}