Legends of Western Cinema Week || Uncomfortable Humanity in 'Broken Trail'

I'm kiiiinda bending the party's rules with this one, because this post was originally published over on Charity Bishop's Femnista.  So it's not brand-new.  However, it hasn't made an appearance on here until now, so I'm saying it counts. 😉  And, since Femnista is closing down on August 1 and Charity has given contributors permission to repost their articles on their own platforms, Legends of Western Cinema Week seemed like the perfect time for this post's Rivendell debut.  

(Note:  What follows is my original draft of this piece, along with a couple of final 2022 tweaks — not the slightly edited version which appeared on Femnista back in 2020.)  

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The 2006 miniseries Broken Trail brings several unique perspectives to the traditional Western paradigm, not the least of which is its exploration of what it’s like on the other end of the brothel business.  Before we get into all of that, though, let's begin with a brief synopsis for those who are unfamiliar with the show's premise.

When Print Ritter, his nephew, and their associate inadvertently intercept a human trafficker, they assume guardianship of the five Asian girls he was transporting.  Now the cowboys find themselves responsible for protecting a group of vulnerable young women who know no English, in addition to pursuing their original goal of delivering a herd of five hundred horses to market several states away.  As if that weren’t enough, they accumulate two more passengers along the way — one of whom has already been a prostitute for decades.

Complications, naturally, ensue.

At first viewing — even at third, fourth, or fifth — we are dazzled by the blinding contrast between the worst of human depravity and the baseline of human decency.  The three men who rescue the girls are heroes to us, yes, but they are heroes simply because they respond as we would wish any “decent human being” to respond.  It is one of those stories in which the heroism consists not of mighty feats but of commonplace gestures, not of stunning bravery but of simple determination.  Our protagonists do not achieve heroic status by ransoming the world, but by their refusal to buy into the lie that they have any right to look away from a travesty that it is in their power to avert.  

Yet even in recognizing this, there is another admission that needs to be made:  the acknowledgement that before they encountered its collateral damage on a personal level, these men quite possibly contributed to the sex trade themselves.  How many saloon bars did they patronize, knowing but not caring what was happening upstairs?  How many women did they walk by, making no effort to help them?  Worst of all, how many of those women did they “purchase” for themselves?

In the novel on which the miniseries is based, author Alan Geoffrion leaves nothing to speculation.  He frankly describes the men’s contradictory attitudes towards the industry, as they sleep with prostitutes at certain times yet rescue those bound for that lifestyle at others.  He depicts the hypocrisy of valuing one victim and but reducing others to an “inferior” class of women. (He implies no moral condemnation of these offenses in his writing; whether he personally recognizes them as such is not clarified. We can but hope.)

Onscreen, the story takes a subtler approach:  we are never specifically told of any past transgressions that these men may or may not have committed.  Indeed, the possibility is not even hinted at.  Rather, it is a troubling idea that dawns on the viewer externally, simply from a familiarity with historical context.  Certainly, not every man in the Old West patronized brothels.  But considering the probable reality of the percentage that did versus the percentage that did not, we are forced to grapple with even the possibility that our Print or Tom or Heck could have perpetuated the very injustice they later fought against.

 

It’s not a pleasant thought.

It’s a slap on the face, actually.  When someone enters your consciousness as a hero, it’s painful to be confronted by that person’s moral failure.  Especially when it’s failure on that level — failure that devastating.  But it does no good to to deny reality, and it really does no good to gloss over our role models’ sin.  So we are left with this troubling dissonance:  How can such clarity and such blindness exist in the same human soul?

The only answer we are given is this:  Sometimes it simply does.   And sometimes we cannot reconcile it.  Sometimes it simply is, and we are left grappling with it in a murky half-light of incomplete resolution for the rest of our days.

“Justice delayed is justice denied,” certainly — but redemption delayed is not necessarily redemption denied.  We do not know whether the men were on the right side of the war initially, but we do know that they got there eventually.  And no, neither Print nor Tom nor Heck launched a large-scale attack against the evil of sex slavery.  But they did engage in a few skirmishes.  They did put a few cracks in the armor of the machine.

They did do something.

It’s like that story of the man walking along the shore, throwing beached starfish back to the waves.  The onlooker is right when he points out that the man cannot possibly hope to save them all.  But the man is equally right when he responds, smiling defiantly as he flings another suffocating creature to safety, that he can save the one he is holding now.

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Have you watched Broken Trail?