Godless

A good man is hard to find

Godless is a beautiful and brutal series, both in visuals and tone. America has been painfully shedding many of its foundational myths over the last century, toppling old statues and reexamining old stories from new perspectives. The myth of the American West hasn’t been toppled so much as it’s gone a bit out of fashion. We make a few Westerns here or there but they are usually hybrids or remakes, more action movie or homage or deconstruction than fresh take (see for example, Westworld). Godless is a true Western. It is simultaneously clear-eyed and reverent about the American West. Above all, it understands that one of the truest stories we have told ourselves about the Old West is that it was a place without an established social contract. It was a place where some people tried very hard to build a home, and others could burn that house down with impunity.

The show is set primarily in La Belle, New Mexico, a town populated almost entirely by women after a mining disaster widows most of its citizens. The women spend their days rebuilding a life and creating their own version of civic order. The brothel becomes a school, the church is a constant work in progress, and every once in a while a woman rides through the streets on a horse, naked. The show is funny like that – you catch yourself laughing in short bursts, tougher scenes forgotten for a beat or two. On the outskirts of the town lives twice-widowed Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery), raising her half-Native American son and trying to keep to herself. When a mysterious drifter (Jack O’Connell) rides onto her property one night, she shoots him in the neck and gets drawn into the messiness of another person’s story.

The women of La Belle are sharply drawn characters and we spend quality time with many of them, almost to the point where it feels a bit rude to pull us away into other more male-dominated storylines. Maggie (Merritt Weaver) is trying to run the town and keep order. Her lover Callie is a former prostitute and current schoolteacher trying to give the children other opportunities than just joining the same industry that killed their fathers. Alice, hardened by the destruction and violence she experienced from her first days in the West, is trying to build her fences, dig a well, and teach her son to read. The drifter, Roy Goode (yes as in Goode vs. evil), rides into their lives and acts as a sort of harbinger. Men are coming to La Belle, men who will upend the careful order these women have built.

But Roy is not a deliberately disruptive force and the show allows us to rest in a strange peace for a few episodes while he learns to read, tames wild horses, and acts as a father figure to Alice’s son. Inside La Belle, peace still holds. The young sheriff’s deputy, Whitey, tries to learn the violin to get close to a girl he’s sweet on. The sheriff visits his wife’s grave and lays a flower.

In these scenes, I could feel the yearning for that kind of Old West mythology. The cowboy, tender with horses and thus trustworthy, the viewer’s clue that he will be tender with women, too. Open spaces, hardworking families, gallows humor. But there are actual gallows in other scenes, and children swinging from them. We cut away time and again from scenes of women trying to build something, teach something, fix something to scenes of careless, cruel male destruction.

Much of this destruction comes at the hands of Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels), a perfect maelstrom of American myths in one charismatic man. He is the leader of a gang of outlaws, of which Roy Goode was once a part. When the gang targets a whole town, Roy decides his moral compass finally does point North and steals some loot, leading the whole party away from the town and after him instead. It doesn’t work. As soon as Roy is far enough away Griffin brings his men back to the town and executes every man, woman, and child who lived there.

Griffin dresses like a preacher and was raised by a band of renegade murderous Mormons. He waxes poetic and at length to everyone in earshot, often his next victims. He’s a man who can’t stop talking, can’t stop mythologizing. He says he has seen his death and knows exactly when it will be. After his arm has to be amputated because it’s so riddled with bullets, he insists on carrying it strapped to his saddle and interprets the bees that cover the rotting flesh as a sign he is on the right path towards his quarry. Roy, who he looked upon as an adopted son, is now a traitor who must be punished along with those who harbor him. We cut again and again to Frank and his thugs as they murder their way towards La Belle.

It’s a powerful juxtaposition: women creating order in a town, men murdering the entire population of one. This parallel is repeatedly illustrated. Alice Fletcher reconciles with the women of La Belle and sells them her tame horses so they can better take care of themselves; men from a mining company come in and steal them when the women won’t agree to sell the mine to them for far below its value. A woman alone in a pox-ridden house tends to the dead and the dying; Frank Griffin rides up and offers her “fatherly” comfort until he’s tired of her, then kills her too. This is the tension at the heart of the Western myth that Godless wants to explore. The women work towards education, equality, stability. The men mostly destroy destroy destroy.

There are good men in this world, and Roy is one of them. His instincts are to protect and build, but he comes from a world that keeps pulling him back to violence, keeps telling him that is what a man is meant to make. He spends the entire show attempting to quietly atone for his time in that other world, the one thundering towards La Belle. But he is drawing it to them and so he can never atone for his sins. That world of violence is Frank Griffin’s world. It made him into the monster he is, just as it made Roy. That other world of violence and death and toxic masculinity is the American West as much as the gentle cowboy or the brave frontierswoman. It is our legacy and our inheritance. Godless knows it’s time we tell the whole story.