I grew up disliking the popular arts that my parent’s generation enjoyed. Country music and western movies were stupid. They were made by stupid people- the same people who allowed and supported the Vietnam war, the same people who didn’t care that we were going to destroy the planet either with bombs or pollution, the same people who oppressed Americans who looked or acted differently from them. The same people who wanted to send me off to war for no good reason.
The art that I enjoyed was, I thought, new and different- a break from tradition, owing little to what came before. It was made by people like Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick. But later I learned that Dylan borrowed heavily from old folk and blues songs in his lyrics and that he was an admirer of country singers like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. And that Martin Scorsese loved John Ford and The Searchers.
I won’t go into all the reasons why this movie is great art, at least not right now. But I will point out that Travis Bickle, “God’s lonely man” in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, is descended directly from John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards character in The Searchers. And when The Joker, the narrator in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, meets the marine called Animal Mother, the scene is almost a copy of the meeting between Ethan and the Comanche called Scar.
So it turns out that the artists I enjoyed were standing on the shoulders of artists that I had shunned. And people my age are not that much different from the generations that came before. Again, young people are going off to a war that was begun for no good reason. We are destroying the planet still, although we have avoided World War III, so far. The allure of some art from my parent’s time is obvious and some of it takes a little study.
For a richer understanding of the movie and what people see in it, I suggest you rent the “bonus disk”, which is available on Netflix. Or go to www.rottentomatoes.com, where it gets a 97% positive rating, and read some reviews.