Paint Your Wagon (1969) is a 22-carat, rip-roaring musical comedy set in a mining community - No Name City - during the period of the California Gold Rush (1848-1855). Directed by Joshua Logan, the film was adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from the 1951 stage show by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and starred Lee Marvin as Ben Rumson, Clint Eastwood as Pardner and Jean Seberg as Elizabeth.
Despite its faults - and it's more ponderous and overblown than it is riotous if I'm being completely honest (which helps explain its failure at the box office) - it's a movie that I love very much.
And what makes me love it is the anarchic, amoral, hobo-punk spirit that the film romanticises and which is embodied in Marvin's character Ben Rumson; a spirit that Pardner - a farmer at heart, looking to settle on a little patch of land rather than a genuine prospector and pioneer always prepared to take a risk and move on - in collusion with Elizabeth - a woman who wants nothing more than the security of a log cabin that she can call home and a loyal, hard-working husband to provide for her - are determined to exorcise in the name of clean living and respectable society.
This ongoing tension between civilization and its discontents is the essentially Freudian theme at the heart of the movie. As Ben Rumson points out, those who desire the taming of Man take every opportunity to coordinate the natural world and control freedom of movement:
"They civilize what's pretty by puttin' up a city / Where nothin' that's pretty can grow
They muddy up the winter and civilize it into / A place too uncivilized even for snow
The first thing you know ...
They civilize left, they civilize right / Till nothing is left, till nothing is right
They civilize freedom till no one is free / No one except, by coincidence me"
- 'The First Thing You Know' (lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner)
Writing in his seminal text - first published in German as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930) - Freud discusses how conflict arises whenever the individual's quest for naked liberty bangs up against the walls and institutions erected by a civilization that demands social conformity, even if it involves a violent repression of the instincts (the latter are always thought of negatively by Freud; as desires derived from and representative of the death drive which threaten the greater good of the community).
Thus, for Freud, as for Pardner and Elizabeth, the unrestricted happiness of men like Ben Rumson - drinking, gambling, fighting, whoring - cannot be allowed to continue; it has to be subject to a system of law and order and enforced with the threat of severe punishment. In other words, if you want to have all the benefits of living in society - education, healthcare, honest work, indoor plumbing, home-cooking etc. - then you just have to accept that certain forms of pleasure are no longer permissible.
And if you don't want these things and refuse to accept any restrictions on your freedom and happiness, then, well, you'll just have to paint your wagon and get out of town - not knowing where you're going, uncertain when you'll arrive, but careless of consequences and pleased simply to be on the way, following your dreams with a song in your heart ...
Click here to play Wand'rin Star, the number one UK single taken from the soundtrack of the film, sung in his own unique manner by Lee Marvin.
See: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey, (The Hogarth Press / Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1969).
