Sidekickin'

Don't follow leaders . . .

            Having survived, many years ago, that Ingmar Bergman series (they remade that recently?) — no thank you, I do not feel a need to engage with scenes from anybody else's harrowing marriage. Therefore, I did not watch any of the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial.

            And now that the GOP Judiciary Committee account has tweeted a GIF of Jack Sparrow looking triumphant, I'm glad I took a pass on that trial. Because I don't want to agree with GOP legislators about anything until they leap into a pit of penitential fire and emerge having come to their senses. And yet I, too, might have been tempted to side with Depp.

            I am a husband. Which God knows does not mean that my cause is ever just. But here's the reason I might have felt myself drawn into Johnny Depp's corner:

            I side with him in movies.

            Depp has no classical training, so we may never have his Hamlet or his Lear. But we have his Ichabod Crane, his Earl of Rochester, his J. M. Barrie, his Sweeny Todd, his John Dillinger, his Mad Hatter, his Ed Wood for God's sake, his Hunter Thompson (twice), his W. Eugene Smith, and above all:

            His Tonto.

            The very laid-back Jay Silverheels (for those of us who remember) owned Tonto, till Johnny came bopping along. The Depp Tonto, in the 2013 film The Lone Ranger, directed by Gene Verbinski, is -- I know I have no right to say this, but if I were myself Indigenous American, I believe to my soul I would get off on Johnny Depp's Tonto.

            This Tonto is a sidekick. But with more attitude than Sancho Panza. More edge than Jim of Huckleberry Finn. More authority than Igor. Gromit with a mouth on him. 

            (Some of the over-the-top double-runaway-train-plus-horseback-on-top-of-train sequences of The Lone Ranger were inspired, Verbinski has said, by The Wrong Trousers.)

            Keith Richards? Depp cited him as a model, along with Pepe Le Pew, for Depp's Jack Sparrow character. The character the GOP Judiciary committee wants to co-opt.

           Not if I have anything to say about it. Not until they renounce Satan.

            I have served as a sidekick, in effect, myself, and did not feel diminished. After the hullaballoo, the writer can adjourn and take command.

            Our president, now, is a natural sidekick. Any day now, he may turn out to ...

            Mike Pence was a sidekick, who did the right thing.

            I once had a t-shirt signed by Clayton Moore, the TV Lone Ranger of my youth. Not much going on there. (In several of his many other roles he is identified on imdb.com as a "Henchman.") In retirement, he was not allowed to use "The Lone Ranger" for profit, so the t-shirt says simply "I was that masked man." Signed in a shopping-center parking lot. One saw how flat the Ranger could be with no William Tell Overture, no great white horse, no Tonto. (On the Tonight Show Silverheels said he married his Italian wife "to get back at Christopher Columbus.")

            When the Lone Ranger of Depp's Tonto came out, in 2013, it was a commercial and critical flop, but I remember liking it. Some great gags, as Depp’s abiding inspiration Buster Keaton would have said. And Depp established Tonto as the brains and the reality-principle of the buddy relationship at the heart, such as it is, of the Lone Ranger tradition.

            The other day I was looking for something to blast away whatever was aesthetically constrictive about my revulsion against gunfire.

            If you take all the guns out of movies, you lose John Wayne with the reins in his teeth, blazing away with a pistol in one hand and a carbine in the other, galloping across a field toward four bad guys, after yelling, at the bad guys' leader (Robert Duvall as Lucky Ned Pepper),"Fill your hand, you son of a bitch"?

            Of course Rooster Cogburn didn't require an assault weapon.

            This is True Grit, the original, I'm talking about. It's a movie in which John Wayne accepts that he is sidekick to a teenage girl.

            Yesterday I rewatched The Lone Ranger online. Well, it is no True Grit. Way too long. But at one point someone takes a Gatling gun (automatic) out of play by lassoing it.

            The last of the movie's many good jokes --

            SPOILER ALERT --

            Is when the Ranger, having come into his own under Tonto's exasperated tutelage, rears up his great horse Silver, and cries:

            "Hi-yo, Silver, away!"

            Which is what Clayton Moore did at the end of every TV episode, with no reaction from the Tonto of Silverheels..

            Here is the reaction of Depp's Tonto:

            "Never do that again."

            And the Lone Ranger (Armie Hammer, embodying the stereotypical -- ahem -- Liberal White Guy), says:

            "Oh. Sorry."

                                    And Here Is Another Limerick About

  A Sorry-Ass Male

"You know," yelled a husband named Hugh,  

"That what I am saying is true!"

            As if that mattered.

            Their whole life was shattered

By one sentence starting with "You ... "