A Storied Shooting

Fact, Legend and Story

Ford’s movie was derived from an eponymous short story by Dorothy Johnson, who also wrote “A Man Called Horse” and “The Hanging Tree,” which were filmed by other directors. In the story the title already has the curious double-meaning that is the key to the plot and to our paradox: one man shoots the dangerous bandit Liberty Valance, but another acquires the reputation for having done so. One of these men (in the movie, Jimmy Stewart as Ransom Stoddard) is largely a representative of law who gains stature and political authority in the course of the narrative while the other (John Wayne as Tom Doniphon) represents an extra-legal power who loses both. The cooperation and tension between these two and their rivalry for the same woman (Vera Miles as Hallie Ericsson) drives Johnson’s story, which is told very briefly in prose so spare it is almost telegraphic. ¹¹ But in the film, which is far more discursive and adds many characters and settings, another layer of meaning is also added to the title: a third “shooter.” For as someone who has taken an existing story and put it on film, John Ford has “shot” Liberty Valance in the cinematic sense. ¹² In the process, he turned a pithy, interesting psychological tale into a parable for the formation of a country and, almost, the modern world.

Robert Pippin briefly notes this sense of Ford as a third shooter in his illuminating, recently published lecture on the film. ¹³ But he does not accord it much significance (I will have more to say about this later on). To Pippin the film is “at its core a tragedy, a mythically significant or representative tragedy” (89) and, on this interpretation, the main tragic figure is Doniphon, the Wayne character, who is repaid for his nobility by having everything taken away from him and being forgotten. But while Doniphon is certainly a tragic figure, and while Pippin is careful to notice many important features of the film that have not been appreciated before, I think he is misled here by his book’s focus on three films in which John Wayne is a lead actor. “The man who shot Liberty Valance” is always (at least) two men—Doniphon and Stoddard and the film is equally about them both and the state that they make, and could only make, together with Hallie. The film (unlike Johnson’s story) chronicles the transition that a community endures from an anarchic (though often cooperative) state of nature where law is ineffective to a sovereign legal state where individuals can no longer use force independently. What happens to Doniphon is part of the price to be paid for that transition and, if we are meant to be reminded of that price, we are also meant to recognize the transition as a human achievement. ¹⁴

To call the film a tragedy makes it Doniphon’s story where in fact it is the story of a would-be democratic society and its enemy, unbounded Liberty. ¹⁵ Generally speaking, the central character of a story is the one who undergoes some kind of change. By that measure (as we shall see), Stoddard is at the narrative’s core. But more important than any of the several characters is the change, through their interaction, of the community itself. It is this social and political change—the demise of lawless Liberty and the securing of statehood and sovereignty—that alters the fates of the characters, none of whom embody this state as a whole. That law and liberty are originally enemies is the uncomfortable truth that Liberty Valance forces us to confront (as Hobbes, in his own way, did as well). Though the film is not a tragedy, I argue, it is pessimistic in the sense that it refuses the familiar narrative of democratic progress where civic freedom produces widespread happiness. Each of the three main characters pays a distinct price for the existence of the state they help bring about with Hallie’s perhaps the most distinct of all.

The film’s best-known line (“print the legend”) in fact represents something like the opposite of its perspective ¹⁶ —which is to carefully deconstruct and reveal (without debunking) the complicated interrelation of law and power in the formation of any state. In the story, both are depicted as incapable, by themselves, of creating or sustaining order in something that resembles a state of nature. But for power to be exercised on behalf of law, it is not enough that it be principled or just—Doniphon is both of these things already, but he is also thoroughly uninterested in governing his fellow citizens, even if they would elect him. Rather, it is only when he is affectively engaged (by love) that he comes to aid of law and legality, knowing that he will not benefit from his engagement. That is to say, the violence he ultimately performs in killing Liberty is not (or not only) an act of exclusion but also, and even principally, an act of self-sacrifice. Indeed, he does not “collect” on his exercise of power but instead his actions are hidden behind the figure of another’s authorship and he is forgotten.

Likewise “law,” as initially embodied in Stoddard, is ineffectual and abstract when it attempts to act on its own. It is also uncommitted. Ransom Stoddard has the option (we are constantly reminded) of leaving the town rather than remaining to solve its problems. It is an option he is often tempted by and, like Doniphon, his steadfastness turns out not to be supported by a disinterested devotion to justice but by an erotic tie that is stronger than any calculation of interest or justice. He too fails to benefit from the institution of justice in the way he optimistically expects at the beginning.

Hallie, whose place in the film is complex, seemingly gets what she and the other ordinary citizens want: to live in a law-abiding community and to witness its material development. And yet most viewers of the film get the distinct impression that she does not enjoy the result as we, or she, might have expected. This is in part because she retains erotic ties to both men and thus shares in the suffering of both, but also, as I explore below, because the gendered aspects of their relationships impose special burdens on her that the others do not share.

As we will see, “the man who shot Liberty Valance”—the lawgiver who instantiates a legal order where there was none—is really both Doniphon and Stoddard, neither one of them sufficient to the task by themselves, both needing and acknowledging the other in the process of state formation. And yet the film itself, in revealing what it takes to have been hidden, is hardly intended as an unpatriotic act—on the contrary, we are meant to be strengthened, if sobered, by the revelation that law is not self-generating or self-sustaining but requires a sacrifice to succeed. The filmmaker, it will transpire, precisely by printing (or shooting) the facts alongside the legend, perpetuates the fortuitous moment of state formation. ¹⁷ What constitutes the state, then, is neither law nor power by themselves, but rather the erotic and narrative ties that create the relationship between them. It is this sustaining narrative, I want to say, that constitutes a response to the democratic paradox—not a resolution of it certainly but a response that renders it less crippling by lessening the tension between the two forces. This response also reveals how inheritors of such moments remain both responsible for and implicated in the maintenance of modern states. Let us see how this happens.

Western Law, Eastern Promises

The film opens with the return (by steam train) of Senator Ransom Stoddard and his wife Hallie to the town of Shinbone in an unnamed Western state. ¹⁸ The arrival of the Senator is a big story to the local newspaper editor. When he learns that the Senator has returned for the funeral of an unknown man, he demands to know the reason. In Johnson’s story, the Senator demurs, giving the bland response that the deceased was an old friend. It is the first signal that the film will be different from the short story—a public rather than a private matter—that the Senator, after consulting with Hallie, admits the editor’s claim (“I have a right to story.” “Yes, I suppose you have”). The story we are to witness has been hidden for decades. At the end of the film, we will learn, it remains hidden (except, of course, to us)—the editor declines to publish what he learns. So the audience is, in effect, the secret spectator for a secret tale of (what turns out to be) state (pro)creation. The film leaves each viewer in the position of the editor, with a choice to make about whether to acknowledge the past and in what way. ¹⁹

After the Senator agrees to tell his story, the film in effect commences for a second time. A flashback begins that will not end until the final minutes of the film. Stoddard is venturing into the territory by stagecoach (thirty or more years earlier) when his party is assaulted by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) who leads a team of well-armed bandits. After surviving the robbery, Stoddard establishes himself in Shinbone, first by washing dishes at a restaurant run by Swedish immigrants. Their daughter Hallie is planning to marry Doniphon but she is attracted to Stoddard’s learning and Eastern sophistication. Stoddard opens a school and eventually becomes a town leader. The members of the town want the territory to become a state but Valance, paid by the ranchers who oppose statehood, continues to terrorize them. After several confrontations, Stoddard appears to kill Valance in a shoot-out, marries Hallie and eventually becomes the first state Governor. But in fact it was Doniphon who killed Valance, shooting from where he could not be seen. And though the town eventually forgets about Doniphon entirely, Ransom and Hallie cannot help but return to his funeral.

Having sketched the plot in outline, I will now focus on some specific scenes that reveal the film’s perspective on state formation and the erotic dynamics between Ransom, Tom and Hallie that underlie it (leaving many other interesting themes to one side). The contrast between civil society and the dangerous space of untamed Liberty is established early on when Valance robs the travelers more violently than he needs to. Ransom protests, asserting his standing as a lawyer, and Valence beats him and then mocks him. When Stoddard’s law books are discovered in the luggage, Valence takes malicious pleasure in tearing them up and then, uttering the words “I’ll teach you law! Western law!” proceeds to beat Ransom further with a silver-handled whip (his trademark weapon) and is only prevented from killing him when one of his own men restrains him. Liberty, we are meant to understand, loathes the “Eastern” written law or any kind of restraint to his behavior. Indeed, his cruelty is most provoked not by a desire for money or personal authority (he has plenty of one and doesn’t care for the other) but precisely by any attempt to regulate or civilize him. ²⁰ Though we later learn that he is in the pay of the cattle barons, it is clear that he despises the (would-be) law-abiding townspeople anyway and is a danger to all even when he acts on his own, which he often does.

The contrast between Liberty’s grandiose self-licensing and Stoddard’s status as an effete law-bearer (literally carrying the books of law from the east to the west) ²¹ is immediately complicated, however, by the arrival of Doniphon. Left for dead in the desert, Stoddard is rescued by Doniphon who brings him into town and into the care of Hallie. Somewhat improbably, Stoddard and Doniphon almost immediately fall into a conversation about the nature of law. Stoddard wants Liberty Valance arrested. Doniphon says: “I know those law books mean a lot to you. But not out here. Out here a man settles his own problems,” and slaps his pistol for emphasis. Stoddard replies: “Do you know what you’re saying to me? You’re saying just exactly what Liberty Valance said.”

In one sense, Doniphon is nothing like Liberty; he has just rescued Stoddard from the desert where Liberty abandoned him. But of course Stoddard’s concern is that Doniphon, at this point, endorses the “Western law” Liberty was referring to, even if he would never enforce it as viciously. Doniphon does share Valance’s contempt for organized authority: the scene ends with Doniphon conspicuously mocking the town’s ineffectual marshal—taking his hat off of his head and dropping it on the floor, knowing the marshal will do nothing in return.

But then why does Doniphon, well-known to be more than a match for Liberty, tolerate his continued dangerous presence? ²² A plausible answer is supplied by Pippin. It is, he argues “precisely because [Doniphon] feels so self-sufficient and independent that he sees no need” to confront Valance. ²³ We could add to this that, so long as he doesn’t threaten Doniphon, there is something convenient for him in having Liberty around. Doniphon’s reputation as a tough guy benefits from the rivalry and the comparison. And there is the affinity that Stoddard has already put his finger on.

But to all this we must add something else. If Doniphon were to dispose of Liberty on behalf of the town, he would be taking it under his protection, putting it under his own rule. It is a responsibility he has no desire for. He wishes the town well but he has no inclination to care for it or to govern it. The town’s dilemma is thus indeed Hobbesian: either the powerful wish to dominate, or, if they do not, they have no reason or desire to help. But without such help, Ransom’s project of democracy and democratic law cannot get off the ground, as he soon discovers. Stoddard wants to bring democratic law to the town but lacks the power to defeat law’s enemies; Doniphon has the power but not the interest. What is it that combines law and power? And can they combine in some way that is not arbitrary or despotic?

To answer this question, we must consider their relations both with and through Hallie, who (although her position is unique) articulates the active desires of the demos. She is not (as she might be in other films) a token passed between the two men but a live participant in a three-pointed relationship that endures even after her ultimate marriage to Stoddard. The success of that relationship requires a delicate reciprocity that does not come naturally to any of the characters. After his humiliation by Valance, the film puts Stoddard in an apron and displays his physical vulnerability at the hands of Liberty, while Doniphon, in his ten-gallon hat, is immune and independent. Their mutual affection for Hallie seems bound to lead to conflict. But a series of failed attempts at union pave the way for a transformation that is equally erotic and political.

Equality and Its Absences

Ford goes out of his way to emphasize visually the multiethnic character of Shinbone, a diversity which formed no part of Johnson’s original story and which seems to add little to the central plot of the film. On repeated viewing, the contrast between the visual multiplicity and the nearly all-white screenplay is one of the most striking elements of the film. One of the first shots of the old town of Shinbone focuses on the “Cantina” where Mexicans (i.e., Mexican Americans) lounge outside in large sombreros for us to notice. Throughout the film, there are many moments when we hear the music from the Cantina and the camera will notice the Mexican Americans even if the main speaking characters do not. It even turns out that the town marshal, Link Appleyard, has a large Spanish-speaking family. Again, these Latinos have no particular role to play in the main action of the film; the original story includes no one but whites—so why film them at all? ²⁴

Of all the speaking characters who have been added to the story by the screenwriters, one of the most notable is Pompey (Woody Strode), Tom Doniphon’s African American ranch hand who has the name of a Roman Republican hero. ²⁵ His race is hardly mentioned at all in the script but his second-class status is indicated by a variety of visual cues including his physical exclusion, clearly noted, from the social and political gatherings of whites. Again, nothing in the overall plot seems to require the role of Pompey to be portrayed by a black actor. All of the other ranch hands seen in the film are white. So what is the point of casting a black actor in the role and then making that fact nearly unspeakable?

The answer to these questions, I think, is to be found in the intricate scene that comes at the very center of the movie where the gap between words and their enactment is vividly rendered. Ransom has settled into town and has begun a school in addition to his fledgling law practice. Hallie was his first student but, as there is no other school in town and even many of the adults (like Doniphon) are functionally illiterate, he has a highly varied classroom. When he enters the room, we see the entire group framed together in a tableaux and they are young and old, immigrant and native, black, white and brown. In fact, it is a group of people much more likely to be representative of, say, a Los Angeles street corner in 1962 than the classroom of a small farming town in a western territory of the 1870s. Given that the United States was in the midst of the conflicts about the racial integration of its schools at the time of film’s making, the tableaux seems designed to send a powerful message. ²⁶

But the message is as much about the obstacles to equality and inclusion as it is a vision of their enactment. The symbolic elements in this scene are so many and so complicated that it is difficult to convey their combined effect. But the gathering of races, sexes and ages tells us that this is no ordinary classroom. The blackboard is already inscribed with the motto which ties the schoolroom to Ransom’s status as a law-bearer, “Education is the basis of law and order”—a very dubious claim, from the standpoint of what we have seen thus far, which will later be significantly erased.

The lesson of the day is also most unusual, even surreal. Ransom begins by “reviewing” (supposedly for the new students) the nature of democracy. He calls upon Hallie’s mother Nora who begins hesitantly, but with increasing confidence, in noticeably accented English: “The United States is a republic. And a republic is a state in which the people are the boss!” Then there begins a very strange exchange between Ransom and Pompey who, we will later learn, is there as a student against Tom’s wishes.

Throughout this part of the scene Stoddard appears patronizing and the exchange clearly establishes a hierarchy between teacher and student, but given the subject that can hardly be the whole point. In the first place, Ransom, from his description, has in fact asked Pompey to name the Constitution, but when Pompey describes Thomas Jefferson as its sole author, Ransom only corrects his grammar. Then when Pompey does name the Constitution, Ransom says “Declaration of Independence” as though it is a correction, when in fact Pompey has given the correct answer to his initial question. And finally when Pompey begins to recite the second paragraph (not the first) of the Declaration, Ransom leaves that uncorrected until Pompey needs his help with the crucial words—words which are visibly and audibly belied by the multiple hierarchies in which the conversation partners are embedded.

What has happened here? For one thing, it has been implied that the Declaration and its sovereign grant of equality (and creation of a legal frontier), and not the Constitution, is the ‘basic law’ of the US. For another, it has been established that this fundamental fact is hard to remember, even for those for whom it is most important to remember, despite its supposed ‘self-evident’ nature. In other words, just as the egalitarian screenplay is (generally) supplemented by a visual depiction which shows something more racially and sexually hierarchical, here it is practically spelled out for us how the text of the Declaration is only enacted and meaningful (to the extent that it is meaningful) in a setting where race and sex have an unspoken power. Yet though Stoddard is the teacher, Pompey does not quite answer the question he has been asked. While he needs help in completing the answer, the answer he gives to the question of ‘fundamental law’ is in fact better and more important then the ‘correct’ answer would have been. ²⁷

What does this mean? For a movie released at the height of the civil rights movement, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that what we have here is an image of a variegated community groping awkwardly, and with missteps, towards a foundational memory which is obscured and yet determining (much like the story of the film itself). In other words, we have a kind of parable within the parable that lets us know some implications of the larger story that the movie cannot explicitly address. The law that Ransom seeks to instantiate (and which Ford is attempting to buttress) is a law of equality the implications of which, even in 1962, are far from fully materialized. And Stoddard’s air of superiority notwithstanding, the images show us that no race has a monopoly on this law’s meaning. The classroom, remarkably, displays both equality and its absence—and the divisions of race (and gender and ethnicity) that are responsible for that absence. ²⁸ It shows the possibilities, and the limits, of what the law-bearer can accomplish on his own.

Those limits are made even more clear when the lesson, hardly begun, is interrupted by the return of Doniphon (who has been away on business). He roughly tells both Pompey and Hallie that they have no business in school (Hallie resists; Pompey doesn’t). More importantly though, he announces the impending return of Liberty Valance, with other thugs, to prevent the town from electing pro-statehood delegates to an impending territorial convention. “Votes,” he says, as if he had heard the lesson and was now refuting it, “won’t stand up against guns.” Tom and Ransom argue with the painted American flag between them. Ransom calls off class, sadly erases his slogan and, when Hallie protests, says “When force threatens, talk’s no good anymore.” The school breaks up in disarray. The point has been made: when Tom and Ransom are at odds, the democratic project is in danger. Tom aims only to defend himself and advises the townspeople, for their own safety, to abandon their drive for statehood. Ransom no longer wears an apron, but has no answer to Ransom’s threat. Hallie attempts to mediate between them but fails.

The Erotic Binding of the Force of Law

After this failure, the film shows the sovereign state made, in effect, twice: the first time as farce and the second as tragedy. That is, there are two scenes in which we see, as clearly as it is possible to see it, the sovereignty of a legal community established over a violent opposition. In both scenes, Liberty Valance is defeated: in the first democratically and ineffectually—he is outvoted but undeterred; in the second he is killed and his threat to civil society is permanently ended. The doubling is necessary to bring home the point, among others, that it is not enough for those who oppose the state to be outnumbered when their antagonism is existential. But the doubling also emphasizes again the insufficiency of both law and power, acting separately, to establish the identity and sovereignty of the demos. This is the path, I maintain, between, as it were, the legends of liberalism and the “facts” of decisionism that the film’s narrative means to thread us through. The difference between the two scenes is Hallie; it is her action and choice that sets in motion the genuinely effective state-making.

Some time after the schoolroom scene, a meeting of the townspeople is convened for the purpose of electing two delegates to the territorial convention. The scene Ford shows us is again so rife with significant images that it is difficult to recognize them all on first viewing. Pompey, his supposed equality once again forgotten, sits, motionless and wordless, outside the meeting hall, cradling his rifle as the town’s white men come to the front door and, being recognized by name, are allowed to enter. That he is guarding the meeting only become apparent later when it is threatened by Liberty. Despite the orderly procession into the meeting, however, once inside, there is chaos. There is no chair or order of business. The citizens talk and shout at one another—not in a violent way but in a way that shows the utter lack of organization or hierarchy among them. How can the meeting come to order if there are no rules or convener? But how can there be a convener if there has been no previous meeting to appoint one? The infinite regress of democratic authority is both audible and visible.

In the midst of the noise, Stoddard sits silently, looking depressed, just one citizen among many. Doniphon sits on the bar, looking amused at what is going on around and beneath him. Finally, after a while, he climbs down off the bar, picks up a giant mallet (a “bung-starter,” in fact) and loudly hammers an unoccupied table at the front of the room, calling the meeting to order. All fall silent. Doniphon immediately nominates Stoddard to conduct the meeting. The motion is met with acclaim. As Stoddard comes to the front, Doniphon tosses him the mallet and says “There’s your regulator, pilgrim.” So authorized, Stoddard goes on to conduct the meeting.

For a moment it seems like law and power can work together easily and harmoniously. Doniphon has stilled the chaos and then graciously turned the proceedings over to someone who will conduct them fairly and according to law. One might even expect Doniphon and Stoddard to be elected as the two delegates. But that is not what happens. After giving an impassioned optimistic speech on behalf of statehood (“We want statehood! . . . It means progress for the future!”), Stoddard nominates Doniphon as a delegate. But Doniphon refuses—he grabs back the mallet—says that he’s got “personal plans” (his planned marriage to Hallie) that prevent his service—and then hands the mallet back to Stoddard and tells him to go on.

At this point, Liberty Valance rides up and approaches the doorway of the meeting. The doorkeepers attempt to refuse him entrance, saying he doesn’t live in the district. Liberty replies, “I live where I hang my hat,” and bursts into the room through swinging doors that form the highly permeable boundary to the political space of the meeting.

This exchange is important because it highlights the central problem the townspeople face, one that Doniphon cannot solve: until their sovereignty and borders are secure, they cannot exclude anyone who claims to be a member of their community, no matter how inimical or hostile his presence is to the community itself. In fact it is not clear that Liberty lives anywhere in particular—we never see his residence—but then why should he? It is part of his role as an embodiment of natural freedom that he can go anywhere, whenever he likes, without having to ask anyone’s permission. There being no state, there can be no hard boundaries or law of citizenship. Inside the meeting, though no one agrees with Valance, no one can deny his right to be present either, though Stoddard pointedly lists his domicile as “address unknown.”

Valance has one of his lackeys nominate him and threatens all those present that there will be unpleasant consequences if he is not elected. But the townspeople, secure in Doniphon’s presence, nominate Stoddard and the town’s newspaper editor as delegates. When the time for voting comes, Valance strides to the front of the room and repeats his threats. When his name his called, he raises his silver whip (in a nice bit of symbolism) to vote for himself but, except for his two lackeys, the room is motionless. For the only time in the film before his death, Valance is silent and looks uncertain how to proceed. Stoddard and the editor are acclaimed as the delegates by the others. Doniphon declares that the election is over and the bar is open and the citizens revert to the boisterous chaos that preceded the meeting. But Valance tells Stoddard plainly that the election is meaningless and that he will kill him that night if he doesn’t leave town.

Once again, Doniphon and Stoddard’s efforts to work together have failed, or have only partially succeeded. They have won the election but still are not truly united; they have rather followed one another serially. Civil society needs boundaries and a rule of membership—here to exclude those who would threaten its democratic character—but neither man has succeeded in sustaining them. The election will be trumped by violence and the fledgling state will be disbanded. At this point, neither man sees an alternative to this outcome. For either Ransom or Tom to kill Valance would violate his principles (for Ransom, the principle of acting through law; for Tom, the principle to only act in self-defense); but without the death of Liberty, the project of sovereign law will fail.

In the crucial scene that shortly follows, the dark double of the first, Ransom faces up to Liberty on a nighttime street. This time Ransom is alone (or appears to be). He has a gun but, since he hardly knows how to use it, believes he has no chance. Just as Liberty’s powers were no powers at all in the meeting room and he was rendered speechless, so here Ransom, in an apron again, is isolated and mute. Liberty mocks him and shoots the gun out of his right hand, forcing him to pick it up with his left. Then they fire at the same time and, miraculously, Liberty falls dead and Ransom escapes further injury. Now the threat of Valance has finally been removed, the sovereign monopoly on the use of force has been established. Ransom begins his career as “the man who shot Liberty Valance.”

But all is not as it seems: this scene, already a double, itself has a double. We will see the same scene over again, a few minutes later, as a flashback within the flashback, but from a different perspective, when Doniphon informs Stoddard that he was not, after all, alone in the street. Doniphon, hidden in a dark alley, firing at the same time as the other two, but unseen and unheard, is the true author of the demise of Liberty Valance. Both men have violated their principles, Stoddard by picking up a gun outside of the law, Doniphon by ambushing someone who was not directly threatening him. But the hidden act solves the problem laid out in the previous scene. Stoddard has appeared to defend himself and, thereby, the legal regime he has helped to bring about. The threat of Liberty has been eliminated; the talents of Stoddard and Doniphon have been combined into a single figure—“the man who shot Liberty Valance”—a self-executing law—a self-sustaining sovereign—who now, with the face of Ransom, can continue the project of statehood.

Why have they each done what they were resolved not to do? The answer is the same for each of them—they both love Hallie and, in the intervening moments, they have both been reminded of what this requires by Hallie herself. Ransom has realized that he cannot bear to leave Hallie, or the town, even at the cost of his own life. And Tom, knowing that Hallie does not want Ransom to die, does for her what he would not do for himself. But Ransom and Tom do not merely cooperate, rather they are united by eros into a new identity that can only exist as a narrative artifact. What kind of man is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?

The Erotic Contract

There can be little doubt that the social union that is brought into being by the end of the film is both stabilized and symbolized by the marital tie between Ransom and Hallie. Equally, one could track the plot of the film as Ransom’s progress from ineffectual feminized kitchen help to authoritative masculine politician. We could, in other words, take the film to simply affirm heterosexual marriage (and the gender subordination it entails) as a central element of the sovereign state of law: “Civil freedom,” as Pateman put it, grounded “upon patriarchal right.” ²⁹ If this were the sum total of the film’s sexual politics, then it would resemble that of many other films and we would have to conclude that, however novel its approach to sovereignty was in some respects, in this it simply repeats (and relies on) traditional sex roles. But The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is not Ransom alone.

Though the film confirms gender conventions (as it confirms a conventional state), the erotic relations depicted within the film are hardly ordinary (or even Hollywood-ordinary). Doniphon and Stoddard each have a relationship with Hallie and through her with one another. Theirs is a peculiarly triangular arrangement that is not at all captured by the idea of sexual rivalry. Despite Ransom’s marriage to Hallie, Doniphon never disappears from their relationship. The whole frame of the movie—the return of Ransom and Hallie to pay tribute to Doniphon—makes that unmistakable. And Ransom’s political name shows how much he owes his identity to Doniphon. The marriage of Ransom and Hallie may (and must) appear conventional but Doniphon’s continuous presence in their relationship is one of the secrets that we, as citizens, are brought to understand by the film’s revelations.

What, then, is the nature of their bond, such that it can be both erotic and political? Both feminism and queer theory have developed a language to think about this kind of relationship. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s question of Billy Budd—“What are the operations necessary to deploy male-male desire as the glue rather than as the solvent of a hierarchical male disciplinary order?”—seems to be exactly the one that the film is attempting to answer. From this perspective, Stoddard’s growth in masculinity over the course of the film appears as an apprenticeship to Doniphon, culminating in a homosocial bond “routed through triangular relations involving a woman.” ³⁰ Liberty Valance is the man who must be killed precisely because he routinely feminizes Stoddard, and Ransom’s induction into the masculine order conforms to the model laid out by Pierre Bourdieu. “Manliness,” he says, is an eminently relational notion, constructed in front of and for other men and against femininity, in a kind of fear of the female, firstly in oneself.” ³¹ Stoddard emulates Doniphon and Doniphon, in his own way, emulates Stoddard (becoming part of his project of law), and all for the sake of Hallie (not, i.e., because they fear her; rather they exorcise their own femininity by together combating an emasculating Liberty in her name).

While this reading gets us closer to the truth, it too has the effect of reducing Hallie to an audience and a token when she is clearly something more. To render the three as equally important (though certainly not equal in other respects), I suggest thinking of their bond as an erotic one, as Anne Carson has defined eros: “where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart.” ³² For each of the three characters, their relations with each of the others is both enabled and obstructed by the presence of the third. This is even true for Ransom and Hallie following their marriage: as many viewers have noticed, they have no children and they do not, in their return to Shinbone, seem very affectionate; in the whole movie, we never see them kiss. Although they are together, it is as if the presence of Doniphon continuously interrupts their union.

Eros, not contract or violence, is the force that binds all three together (and yet apart)—and through them, the community—with a power that is all the stronger for being unconsummated. In one of the final scenes of the film, we see that Hallie has brought a cactus rose in from the desert and has placed it on Tom’s coffin. ³³ Some have interpreted this to mean that she “really” loves Tom (as opposed to Ransom) and always has. But this makes no sense—she was never under any obligation to leave Tom and clearly chose to do so. But what does make sense, and is merely hard to acknowledge, is that she loved them both—bigamously one could say—and would perhaps have continued to do so outwardly if the rules of society permitted it. Or perhaps it is best to say that Hallie, like the rest of the community that she often speaks for, loves The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—the composite lawgiver created by the erotic bond. Unlike the rest of the community (but like us), she knows his two faces, the fact and the legend. ³⁴ By continuing to care for both, she maintains the bond of identity between them to the end.

In both politics and cinema, it can be easy to see eros as a destructive force (the femme fatale, the sex scandal), one that primarily instigates conflict. Or if it is to be constructive, it is supposed to work through conventional forms, like heterosexual marriage. What is so unusual in this film is the way in which an erotic rivalry becomes a form of cooperation so that power and law enlist one another’s support against a chaos that is not erotic (or if erotic, only sadistic). The rivalry is not resolved with a victory for one party but rather crystallized in a continuing relationship that preserves the foundational moment.

But more importantly, I believe, this presentation of eros transforms our perception of “power” and “law” so that they do not appear to be opposite forms of social organization. Our approach to the paradox at the foundation of democracy cannot be to find a magical (or miraculous) ground to pre-authorize foundational arbitrary power, nor can it be to discover some perfectly self-authorizing law or rational procedure. Rather, it is only when we see law and power not as originary and opposite forces but as two halves of an erotic whole that we can understand the formation of a state as an act worth remembering and acknowledging, with all attendant costs and sacrifices. It would be wrong, then, to see the characters as “symbols”—as if ideas like “law” and “power” were normally disembodied phenomena that a work of fiction might choose to represent as human. The point is rather that, in politics, ideas and power can only exist as the expression of embodied beings who can always, in principle, relate to one another erotically.

Especially in the literature derived from Schmitt, discourse on the democratic paradox can take place within the grip of a political ontology in which law and power are treated like matter and anti-matter—as if they naturally operate in wholly separate registers (law within a state; power outside) and must annihilate one another whenever they meet. From this perspective, any relationship between them naturally looks paradoxical or self-contradictory, or as if one is simply in service to the other. When, by contrast, we understand both as human activities, performed by individuals whose potentials exist within a shared horizon of narrative meaning, we are better positioned to articulate and grasp how the (very) political origin of sovereign authority might be theorized.

I do not mean, of course, that the bond of eros (much less the modern state) is something we can uncritically celebrate in any form. Even though the three characters here have equal stature in some sense, their roles remain gender-delimited, where men “belong on the side of all things external, official, public, straight, high . . . [and] perform all the brief, dangerous and spectacular acts.” ³⁵ Though Hallie participates emotionally in the forging of the erotico-political union, she never participates politically in the ordinary sense and there is no forum for her to do so. Whether a refashioned erotic bond could perform the same function of political adhesion while providing for more genuine equality is not something I can answer here. But my question has not been whether a sovereign democracy can be celebrated but whether it can be tolerated. Even without calling attention to the gender prescriptions embedded in it, the erotic contract that Liberty Valance imagines will inevitably be, as in Carson’s Sapphic interpretation, bittersweet. Eros is always a particular attraction; it unites two or several but never all because it also excludes as it unites. But what it unites, it unites humanistically—it persuades without convincing and forces without violence—which is to say it shows how reason and power can be complementary elements of political attachment, and not always or only rival sources of social organization.

The State’s Ransom

Many interpretations of the film, including those of Pippin and Tag Gallagher, are hostile to the character of Ransom Stoddard. A “ransom” is supposed to be something one pays to go free, and yet it seems to them that Stoddard has largely benefited from his part in the story while the full payment is left to Doniphon. Stoddard seems to them even to be patronizing and unappreciative. ³⁶ Why then is Ransom named Ransom? What price has he paid? ³⁷

The answer, I believe, can be found in the last scene of the flashback. Having recovered from his injury, Stoddard travels to “Capitol City” as one of Shinbone’s representatives to the territorial convention that will in turn send a representative to Washington to argue for (or against) statehood. Some commentators have seen this scene as extraneous but I think it is essential to understanding the burden that Ransom shares along with his rewards. At the convention, the ranchers nominate their patsy with an eloquent speech delivered by one Major Cassius Starbuckle (John Carradine). From his name, accent and clothing, it seems very likely that Starbuckle was a major in the Confederate army, which tells us much of what we need to know about the (unseen) ranchers’ motives.

When his friends nominate Stoddard, Starbuckle leaps to his feet and opposes the nomination on the grounds that Stoddard’s only qualification “is that he killed man.” Stoddard, not yet knowing the truth, is shamed by this and retreats to a side office. Doniphon finds him there and this is the moment where he shows Stoddard that he, Doniphon, killed Liberty from the alley. Stoddard recovers his courage. He does not, as Starbuckle declared, have “the mark of Cain” on him after all. He resolves to go back into the convention and the larger flashback finally ends with the sight of Stoddard returning to the public space as Jimmy Stewart’s voiceover tells us that he went on to win statehood for the territory and to become its first governor.

With Liberty Valance already dead, what is the point of this scene? Are Stoddard and Starbuckle the same? They are both of them playing parts that they know, in some sense, to be a sham. Starbuckle pretends to speak from the heart when in fact his words are prepackaged and he has no doubt been well paid by the ranchers. Stoddard takes on the role of “the man who shot Liberty Valance” and he cannot give it up without giving up the authority (or the rewards) it has conferred on him. Some have concluded from this that the film means to condemn all politicians and all fakery in favor of Doniphon’s “chivalry” or “honesty” and also simply to decry the decline of the old West and its code of honor.

Rene Girard famously describes a sacrifice as an act with two faces, “appearing at times as a sacred obligation to be neglected at grave peril, at other times as a sort of criminal activity.” ³⁸ It is clear enough that Doniphon has performed such an act, one of fraternal solidarity or murder, depending on your perspective. Here, Stoddard’s political career takes on a parallel aspect—it is both a fraud based on a lie and a duty to others that must, for the sake of society, be performed. ³⁹

Ransom wins political office and power but has to live with the permanent consciousness of being an actor, as heavy a burden, in its own way, as Doniphon’s decline into obscurity. Every time he hears his moniker (which is often), he is reminded of his status as an impostor. This is the bitterness that is inevitably tied to the sweetness of his erotic connection. He has to perform, not be his natural self—not just a single time, as Doniphon did, but for an entire lifetime. He is able to do this and he does it for Hallie’s sake, but that does not mean he enjoys it. At the beginning, he is an enthusiast for the law and education (glibly telling Hallie, e.g., that he can teach her to read “in no time” and that it will transform her life) and earnestly promises the townspeople “progress.” By the end, the law and the freedom he has won for himself and others afford him no joy. He has shed his optimism, we might say, and become a democratic pessimist, having learned that freedom and happiness are at odds with one another. ⁴⁰ A ransom is the price one held hostage by crime pays to go free. We are reluctant to pay (among other reasons) because to do so seems to validate the crime. The price of freedom here is a sacrifice of dignity and happiness that Ransom pays, in his own way, as much as Tom does.

The Third Shooter

Hannah Arendt famously quoted Isak Dinesen at the beginning of the “Action” chapter of The Human Condition: “All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.” The story of the end of Liberty is an erotic one but it is the narrative that makes the individual relationships into a lasting constellation of political consequence. Both fact and legend, the narrative of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance creates us as the inheritors of a violent past that we can choose to acknowledge or, like the editor, choose to ignore. We cannot undo the violence that has created and sustained the democracy we enjoy, neither can we legalize it—any more than the original participants could—but perhaps we can bear to live with its memory if we come to believe that its origin was not selfish but shared and burdensome to those who perpetrated it. Not just an arbitrary decision to exclude but a creative and collective act of union.

The story of the man who shot Liberty is not something that the facts themselves could somehow conjure into existence. For this we need a third “shooter,” in this case the filmmaker, that is someone who is able to make the bare actions of individuals into a coherent narrative that supports the town’s existence as a sovereign entity of law. This narration in some sense replicates or perpetuates the binding-by-separating function of Hallie’s love. For it is her relationship with both men that ensures, for everyone else in the town, that they have not acted selfishly, for their own motives (to become powerful or famous, etc.), that is, that the shooting has the proper meaning—that it means the establishment of law and not just, as it could, the continuation of rule by the gun. It is the story of the death of Liberty, not the bullet that kills him, that ensures the state of law continues past its founding moments. If we are sustained, in any way, by this narrative, it is the third shooter who has provided us with something of political value, not the (fictional) characters who fired (fictional) weapons. Eros makes the narrative and the narrative makes the state. And narrative is neither reason nor power, but something that binds them together into an action with a meaning that can be perpetuated to an audience.

I do not mean to suggest here that the film’s narrative is trying to (or somehow could) justify all the violence in the American past (its attention to continuing inequality, I believe, is evidence enough of that). The story actually represents an ideal case with a perfectly vicious enemy and asks whether any kind of extra-legal exclusion in state-making can ever be acknowledged by a law-bound polity. Dinesen may have been wrong to suggest that all sorrows can be borne in such a fashion, but Arendt was not wrong to argue that deeds only become part of a polity’s identity when they are remembered and retold—that power and law cannot perpetuate their authority without a narrative. ⁴¹ Even in ideal cases, though, as the epigraph suggests, such incorporation comes with a price.

Sovereign Pessimism

The democratic paradox is actually made more paradoxical when we allow our ordinary expectations about law and sovereignty to become distorted by an excess of optimism. Mouffe argues that coming to terms with the paradox means “Coming to terms with the constitutive nature of power [and] relinquishing the ideal of a democratic society as the realization of a perfect harmony or transparency.” ⁴² Liberty Valance gives us a concrete example of what that process might look like. The optimist presumes that there must be some way for our freedom to not be linked to suffering—of others or of ourselves. If instead we recognize, as the pessimists recognize, that freedom and happiness are in tension, then the situation is less paradoxical, more political. We can only choose freedom, as founders might have, knowing it will burden others and ourselves. If we cannot relieve freedom of its continuing burden of exclusion, we can at least acknowledge that we have done so and make what amends are possible.

The ending of the film is notably ambivalent. Ransom and Hallie board a train back to Washington. The conductor explains how the railway is holding an express train in St. Louis so that the Senator can return to Washington that much faster. Ransom strikes a match and is about to light his pipe as he thanks the conductor. When the conductor replies “Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance,” Ransom pauses and then blows out the match and puts down the unlit pipe—he and Hallie stare blankly ahead. The state they have won is not crowned by happiness—indeed, they are constantly reminded of what they have lost and have not even the oblivion afforded to Doniphon for relief. Ransom must always play the part of the shooter. Hallie is haunted by the man she could not keep. The sadness on their faces is not only for the unremembered Doniphon, it is also for themselves.

If the only loss, in establishing a sovereign community of law, were the death of obnoxious villains like Valance, the choice would be a relatively easy one. But, as we have seen, Valance is not the only one who pays. In this film, more plausibly, civic freedom comes with a visible and continuing cost—one paid not only by those excluded but by all who participate in the act of exclusion as well.

Optimistic democrats like Habermas, and even Connolly and Honig to a degree, want the future to make up for the past. The sense of Liberty Valance is that it never will. But at the same time it shows that setting the fact alongside the legend does not, in fact, destroy the state or its legitimacy, as someone like Agamben thinks it must. The film gives the lie to a promise of ‘progress for the future’ that optimists wrongly believe to be a necessary supplement to modern democracy—without falling back into the Schmittian position that exclusion is the essence of the state. It takes up the challenge of Mouffe and Honig to endure the paradox without paying off the debt it creates with a currency from the future. The state is depicted as the bittersweet constitutive merging of law and power enacted by humans bound together by erotic forces. Whether it was worth it is a question always to be answered in the present by an audience that receives this state as a narrative inheritance and has to decide whether to reprint it.

It is no wonder Ford’s film, even with its all-star cast, was unpopular. ⁴³ Asking an audience not simply to acknowledge foundational violence but to accept responsibility for sustaining its effects, may be mature and even patriotic. But only individuals of a peculiar temperament would find it entertaining. As Rousseau pointed out long ago, to expect a theatrical audience to enjoy hearing the truth about themselves is to court commercial failure. At best one might hope, with Girard, for a condition in which the demos of a modern state “is both attracted and repelled by its own origins.” ⁴⁴ If the film is a favorite of political theorists, it is because it asks and answers fundamental questions about the nature of sovereign democracy. While the film does not dissolve the paradox, it suggests a pessimistic way of working through it without avoiding its most painful aspects.

Asking who really shot Liberty Valance is like asking whether Washington or Jefferson is the true author of the American Republic. Such a question can only be answered: not one man or one act, but only humans together can make a state. They can only make a state of law by excluding other humans and by sacrificing part of themselves in that exclusion. It is eros that unites them and a story that sustains their union—not through a miraculous act of ratiocination or decision but simply through a capacity to dissolve boundaries (between individuals, between law and power, between this moment and the next one) which otherwise seem static and impermeable. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is like one of those strange creatures from Plato’s Symposium who has found its other half. And of course, like all erotic seekers, having found what it has searched for, it is inevitably disappointed by wholeness. States are sustained by our endurance of that disappointment.