Writing fiction about fiction is a tricky business. A writer who does so runs the risk of either peppering their work with too many obnoxious in-jokes, being seen as smugly and self-indulgently trying to demonstrate their own perceived insight into the knees, joints, tendons and ligaments that keep the story (and indeed most stories) twitching. It relieves me to report that Gore Verbinski’s Rango is neither, and is in fact a playfully existential tribute to the joys of genre and fiction not unlike Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
Johnny Depp was the star in another post-modern western (which coincidentally also featured Alfred Molina), Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. When making that film, Jarmusch said that his inspiration for filming the story as a western came from the fact that the genre is “very open to metaphor, and has deep roots in classical narrative forms.”
It must be addressed that Rango is not actually the name of the character, who when we are introduced to him is not even that much of a character, but a protagonist-an idea-acting act a mock Jacobean romance drama in his terrarium with a collection of broken toys and dead bugs. After critiquing his motley troupes unsatisfactory rehearsal, he responds to the criticism that his character is undefined. He protests for a while, then concedes that his character lacks conflict, and concludes that what he needs is an unexpected and ironic event which will provide him with that necessary conflict which will further sharpen his character’s attributes-right before his terrarium is catapulted from the family car and he’s forced to begin his journey. It’s a clever joke, one that illuminates the underlying conceit behind most, if not all fiction, and it’s not the only one of its kind in the movie. If nothing else, it’s guaranteed its longevity as a teaching tool in introductory English and Film courses.
Verbinski has stated that his inspiration came not only from the spaghetti westerns but the Greek classics, and it shows. There’s even a blind oracle. The patriarch of the mole clan asks one of his sons if Rango (now acting like a stereotypical sheriff) looks like he sounds. His physical blindness allows him to avoid the superficial judgement that so easily impressed the other critters in the town of Dirt.
The first person The Protagonist encounters is a half-dead armadillo on the side of the road, who speaks of his pilgrimage to the “Spirit of the West”. This character, on a superficial level at least, reminded me Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who’s 1970 picture El Topo was also about the aimless traversing of the sands in search of a quasi-Aboriginal spiritual revelation.
Rango eventually does meet this spirit after his sham is shattered at the end of the second act, once again forcing him to confront the fact that he is a merely a placeholder protagonist only pretending that he has a real identity in order to play into the expectations of others. The spirit (in the form of Clint Eastwood, a figure Rango recognizes) seems to give Rango his imperative back, but nothing as substantial as an actual soul. “We see what we need to see”, says the armadillo, which suggests that Rango’s existential crisis is really just a momentary loss of confidence. Rango is still as empty as ever, and there’s something oddly defeatist about how he simply accepts that he is in essence nothing but a reaction to the needs of the people of dirt. He hasn’t found himself, he’s just given up looking all together. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern protested their predestined deaths. William Blake was somewhat unwillingly forced into his spiritual role by Nobody (who decided that this Blake was the reincarnation of the poet, and thus must be returned to the other side). Rango just accepts what he must do because he’s bored. There’s no tragedy there, only Rango’s refusal to “walk out on his own story”.
Perhaps this empty, self-actualized spirituality is fitting for a sketch of a character who exists to animate a meta-textual concept, but it becomes quite puzzling when the film tacks on a happy ending because, you know, it’s still a Nickelodeon movie. I understand that Nickelodeon did all they could to market this as a Dreamworks-styled “fish out of water adventure” is it too much to ask that a cartoon lizard face and accept the inevitability of its own death? An ending that’s supposed to be uplifting becomes quite the opposite when it occurs on the tail of a shell of a protagonist conceding that he has no real identity and just gives in to a never-ending performance piece because it’s what’s expected of him. We’re supposed to be happy that he has no soul, and never bothered to look for it.
This emptiness is amplified by the film’s lamentable and predictable treatment of Christianity. The corrupt tortoise mayor (modeled after John Huston in Chinatown, right down to the water plot), employs a none-too-subtle approximation of a Southern Baptist revival service, with “the holy spigot”, held aloft like a crucifix. This will, of course, flatter those secular critics and viewers to whom Christianity is nothing but a series of strange chants and gestures that makes people hate science and start wars. It’s not quite as offensive as the Ian Paisley penguin elders in Happy Feet, but that hardly means it’s an improvement.
But there is a hint of a real spiritual dimension in the film, and it comes from the anti-heroic character called Rattlesnake Jake. Jake threatens to drag the poor lizard to hell if he ever shows his face in town again, when the character Beans tells him to go to hell, he retorts: “Where do you think I come from?”
It is tempting to say that Rattlesnake Jake is a manifestation of the archetypal Miltonian Lucifer, but he seems less a creature raging against divine punishment and more an unconstrained instrument of it. It’s worth remembering that “satan” is not a name, but a title derived from the Hebrew word for adversary. An x factor which is introduced to bring out the true virtues and vices of all who encounter him. All this of course befits Jake’s role as the antagonist not only of Rango, but of everyone else, even the main villain. Jake is not by default the ultimate evil, but simply one to play, excuse the phrase, Devil’s Advocate. He has a certain similarity to Mikael Bulgakov’s devil in The Master and Margarita, an agent that is sent not only to damn, but to test (the test which Rango initially fails). Jake mocks the Mayor’s attempts to control the divination and damnation, violently and defiantly reacting when the old tortoise tells him to calm down. The Mayor may have invoked Jake to serve his own ends, but he cannot be controlled. The Mayor will later fail a test of his own, and is suitably damned. Not because it is Jake’s imperative to damn him, but as a logical conclusion to his own actions.
Rango is a funny film, and it does well when it examines the constructs that underlay any good story. It’s proud to be an animated film with weightier material than most Western viewers are prepared to think that an animated film can manage. Yet its spiritual ambitions are not quite ambitious enough, and downright lacking most of the time. nevertheless, I still recommend it, and consider it not only one of my favorite animated films ever, but one of my favorite westerns. It certainly has one of my new favorite theme songs.
