I made the correct decision on a whim recently, watching The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix (spoilers ahead, it’s excellent and you should watch it). Unexpectedly, it ended up being a collection of short Western films, all with unique perspectives and styles yet all maintaining an underlying sense of direction that remains intentional and consistent. They span from exaggerative, silly musicals to disturbingly bleak snapshots of humanity – though even the most sing-songy of the bunch, following Buster Scruggs himself, the West Texas Tit (not Twit), is one that ends on a surprisingly somber and unexpected note examining the cycle of “Big Name” to “Left in the Dust.” And “Ballad” is not an exaggeration; I was pleasantly surprised by the quantity and quality of the music in Buster Scruggs.
I have a lot of thoughts on this collection of short films, but there’s one moment in particular I want to highlight. Overall, I also want to highlight the diverse collection of themes and atmospheres achieved in a relatively short amount of time; I was genuinely impressed as I watched. The most surprising turn for me had to be when I thought I was watching a touching romance between two unlikely lovers, only for it to careen into tragedy. It was frustrating but understandable, so I have to give it some roses.
Specifically, the moment that I want to highlight relates to narrative structure: what it demands of stories (at least in Western storytelling), and what that means for our creative possibilities. It’s at the climax of the gold panner’s vignette. We’ve followed a crotchety old man’s painstaking efforts to locate “the Pocket,” the underground source of all the gold flecks he’s been panning for and using to narrow down its location.
Eventually, he does find the Pocket… and the chronology is important to me in this moment. As he was celebrating his having found the gold – and I’m sure I’m far from the only one – I realized something was about to happen. Something had to happen, because at this point in the story, the only struggle that’s been presented has been entirely inward; the old man’s determination is unyielding, and given his doggedness and intelligent approach to tracking down the gold, I’d be shocked if anyone thought he wouldn’t find it. So, something has to happen, because if it doesn’t, the story has been about a triumph and nothing else.
Is that a story? Man wants gold, but it’s hidden. Man tracks it down with persistent determination. Man goes home unharmed and enjoys his gold. The end. Some would say yes, and I definitely had more than one professor who would say no. I’d be pedantic and argue “yes, but not an interesting one.” Ultimately, I think this moment, when I thought “something has to happen here”… and something did happen… was when I realized that A) Buster Scruggs knows what it’s doing, and B) narrative structure is a funny thing. Then, like a decision tree, when I saw our gold panning protagonist held at gunpoint, realizing someone is behind him and knowing there’s nothing he can do about it, I knew one of two things would happen. Deus ex machina in which the panner manages to swing his digging tool at his attacker without being shot at point-blank range, or our protagonist gets shot.
So the gold panner got shot. That was where I thought it would end, but Buster Scruggs wasn’t done with me yet. The earlier shot of his digging tool one might’ve thought was a red herring now, in retrospect, becomes foreshadowing for the moment that, long after shooting the protagonist and watching the blood from the wound stain the whole of his back, the assailing gunman jumps into the hole to assess his spoils, and is promptly attacked by the gold panner, who manages to get the gun and kill the young bandit.
It’s interesting how this single moment of what seems like our protagonist’s total defeat turns his survival not into a guarantee of the narrative, as it was previously, but as an element we’re suddenly thankful to have. The ending isn’t some drastic shift. Our protagonist gets his gold – wounded, but alive. The simple act of someone trying to steal something from him, particularly in trying to steal the hard-earned fruits of his labor, turns this from a one-note vignette into a compelling short film. This speaks volumes to me on the importance of obstacles and threats in storytelling, and the extreme weight they can carry. Not just weight, sometimes, but theme and importance itself. Without the bandit shooting our gold panner in the back, without something getting in the way of his victory, the entire exercise of the film would be in patting oneself on the back for telling a wholly happy story in a world of woe. Nice in theory, but ultimately somewhat vapid when sinking your teeth into it.
Like professional torture, compelling storytelling necessitates that its characters suffer, or in the least face a competent threat.
Author C. F. Bellairs 