28: Zebulon Cardoza, and Other Cowboys
The United States of America is a large nation. It contains multitudes in natural geography, biomes, political beliefs, and cultural institutions. It is inherently a cosmopolitan and multicultural society, being a land comprised of a majority of immigrants and their descendants, and yet even among those recent immigrants the US finds a way to put its stamp on their cultural institutions, turning them American. This is how we can have so many things that are incredibly US specific. The NY style pizza, the cheeseburger, General Tso’s Chicken, the Mission burrito, the cookout, the barbecue, the debates over what constitutes a cookout vs. barbecue, the baseball game, the football game, the Vegas title fight, Disneyland, Yellowstone National Park, Yogi Berra, Yogi Bear, The Yogi Indra Devi, the jazz singer, the blues singer, the rock & roller, the hillbilly singer, the texano singer, and the rapper are all unique to these borders and beautiful symbols of who we are and what we do, but when one is looking for the singular embodiment of Americanness as a symbol, nothing quite trumps the cowboy.
Actual historical cowboys were probably pretty boring. The wide open spaces and lack of hard and firm property rights in the vast American prairie in the 19th century meant that cattle ranching was a relatively easy way to work the land, but the very same lack of people in the west that allowed for easy ranching made it difficult to sell one’s product, hence the hiring of cattle drivers or “cowboys” to move herds sometimes hundreds of miles to railway stops or market towns where they could be sold and a profit could be made. Cowboys were effectively drifters, rootless men who were desperate enough that riding hundreds of miles through the most boring landscape imaginable babysitting cows sounded like a good gig. They wore brimmed hats for sun protection and leather leg coverings to protect their legs during long rides, but aside from these two things they would look nothing like the modern conceptions of cowboys. Riveted denim clothing wasn’t popularized among western workers until the 1890s, even then gaining popularity slowly across the region until the dude ranch craze of the 1930s. Pearl snaps and embroidered tall unlaced leather boots were imported as cowboy styles from migrant Vaqueros from northern Mexico. The most common hat for an early cowboy to wear was a bowler, until John B Stetson’s “Boss of the Prairie” hat (originally a wide brimmed bowler) slowly started to gain popularity, becoming the default for the cowboy after the distinctively dented and bent Boss of the Prairie hat belonging to “Buffalo” Bill Cody became the hat people back east first saw a cowboy wear when they attended the wild west shows he put on. Eventually a former telegraph operator named Orton Grover Autrey took the stage name “Gene” and appeared in the pictures synergizing all these disparate elements vaguely associated with the American West, and added in his own brand of hillbilly singing and created what we now think of as the Cowboy.
In the massive expansion of American culture worldwide throughout the 20th Century the cowboy became the distinctly American symbol exported by Hollywood. There were comedies of high society and crime dramas and war stories in worldwide cinemas showing Hollywood movies, but each of those had obvious local analogues, but the Western, starring cowboys like Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood was the uniquely American symbol. America loved cowboys so much that it elected cowboy actor Ronald Reagan to the highest office in the land*. When a Jewish son of a Brooklyn doctor named Elliot Charles Adnopoz sought a more “authentic” look for his folk music career (itself a mostly meaningless statement) he put on a Stetson hat and restyled himself Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. When French magazine Le Figaro asked several prominent film directors from other countries to depict what they thought frenchness was for their series Les Français vus par… American director David Lynch created a short film exploring American and French stereotypes, titled not “The American and the Frenchman”, but The Cowboy and the Frenchman.
The Cowboy is a useful fiction and projection of a certain kind of American-ness, and specifically that American-ness in cinema, which is why the Coens love cowboys so very much, shoehorning them into their movies in the strangest ways.
Two of the Coens’ 18 films made to date are straight up westerns, their 2010 adaptation of the Charles Portis novel True Grit, and the 2018 direct-to-Netflix anthology collection The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Naturally, these films are full of cowboys, though the way that they use cowboy imagery is notable. Both films contain multitudes of figures as one might find in the American West in the 19th century, but the rough riding hard men we would mostly think of as “cowboy” come in multiple varieties. In both films there are ostentatious and braggadocious men outfitted in big broad hats who while they have a certain level of competence are definitely more bluster than action: in Buster Scruggs the titular Buster Scruggs and LaBoeuf in True Grit.
Both of these men also wear some of the more gaudy aspects of western wear on their torsos in LaBoeuf’s excessive fringe and Buster Scruggs’s embroidered and piped (and somehow miraculously clean) pearl snap shirts. Both men represent the flash of cowboy-ness, a kind of peacock esque “look at me and how impressively manly I am”. Both men are not wholly incapable: LaBoeuf is a clean shot and can ride a horse well, and Buster Scruggs is comically good at murder, but at the same time neither are great successes. Scruggs is himself murdered by the first cowboy who takes him on his own terms, and LaBoeuf is not ultimately the man who brings the Pepper Gang to justice**. Both films also feature a kind of opposite-end of the cowboy spectrum to their more peacock-y characters in Buster Scruggs’s Mr. Arthur from the segment “The Girl Who Got Rattled” and the incredibly gritty Rooster Cogburn from True Grit.
These men dress in more sombre ill kept earth tones. They have big hats to be sure, but their big hats are clearly about function more than form. Cogburn and Arthur are hard men whose eyes are open about the hard decisions they may need to face to do what’s right. While Cogburn certainly thinks highly of himself, neither men are ostentatious. Each man also proves himself in extraordinary circumstances to protect and serve a young woman, with Arthur fighting off dozens of Comanches single handedly to save himself and Alice, the titular “Girl Who Got Rattled”, and Cogburn in a single horse charge taking out the majority of the Pepper Gang and subsequently riding through the night to save Mattie from her snake bite. Each of these men of course experience some degree of failure, with Alice losing her life and Mattie her arm. Each man though takes this degree of failure quietly, neither rejoicing in their relative successes (saving the wagon train, saving Mattie’s life) nor wallowing in their failures of their respective losses of life and limb. Cogburn and Arthur are hard, yet competent men who for better or worse find expression of emotion difficult. Scruggs and LaBoeuf are brash and braggadocious. It’s not that they have no ability or skill, but they certainly represent an abundance of flash that isn’t 100% backed up when they find themselves in over their heads, and this kind of brash asshole cowboy is the kind most often used as shorthand in the Coens’s films.
A pair of the Coens’ films set in modern times could be classified as “western” owing to their settings in Texas, though in reality both Blood Simple (1984) and No Country For Old Men (2007) have far more in common with crime thrillers and film noir than they do with the cowboy features of Sergio Leone or John Ford. Nevertheless they take place in Central and West Texas respectively, dusty places full of cacti, and so it makes sense that detective Loren Visser and hitman Carson Wells would take in certain cowboy trappings.
M Emmet Walsh’s villainous Loren Visser wears a moderately ridiculous yellow suit with elaborate piping as well as a large straw cowboy hat. Between his getup, the fact that he’s all smiles and giggles as he makes arrangements with Dan Hedaya’s character —the cabrón bar owner Marty— and the fact that he’s a bit of a round man would seem to make Visser a silly character. He would be a silly character but for the fact that behind that getup and giggles he’s a cold blooded killer. Visser thinks little of murder, nor of even the kind of honor among criminals that would make him honor a murder contract. He’s happy to kill everyone involved in the film’s love triangle so long as it leaves him paid and without any witnesses to his own criminal acts. His own brashness that he thinks he can get away with his attempted triple homicide unscathed is the hubris that undoes him. Similarly, there’s a kind of unearned confidence that goes along with Woody Harrelson’s depiction of hitman Carson Wells in No Country For Old Men.
Wells is brought in as a kind of clean-up operative after an attempt to retrieve some criminally obtained stolen money by sociopath Anton Chigurh turns out to leave a rather sizable string of bodies in his wake in attempting to complete his task. “No need to worry about this mess, I can easily fix it” Wells implies as he sits chatting with both the boss of the criminal syndicate and the man who took the money with his neatly tailored grey suit and comically large cowboy hat. Wells is of course far from the 3rd act cavalry coming in to save the day in No Country, as he quickly becomes yet another one of Chigurh’s body count (despite them ostensibly working for the same criminal enterprise). Once again, the big hat serves as a symbol for brashness and overconfidence that turns out to be poorly placed.
While some conception of cowboys is as the wild men of the west, a great deal more of how the cowboy image swept across the nation was because of entertainers, first from the Wild West Shows and rodeos starting in the 1880s, and followed by Hollywood westerns. Two of the cowboys in the Coens’ oeuvre fall into this mold, the singing cowboy actor Hobie Doyle from Hail, Caesar! (2016) and the singing cowboy folk singer Al Cody from Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).
These cowboys lack the braggadocio of many of the others mentioned in this very essay, as they recognize that they are not themselves the wild men of the west, but merely signifiers thereof. Hobie, ironically, is humble and deferent despite the fact that he can easily perform an intricate riding and shooting trick shot and immediately tell his director that he can do it better if they need an extra take, and apologizes to his date for his poor singing performance in the fictitious western Lazy Ol’ Moon for not being allowed an extra take performing the song. He can even tie a lasso with a spaghetti noodle, and even still he is humble, accepting that his skills are not the end all be all of film acting, as he tries his best to please director Laurence Lorentz, and is in awe of his date Carlotta Valdez’s ability to “dance with all those ber’nanners on [her] head.” In Inside Llewyn Davis our cowboy performer is the meek and shy Al Cody, introduced as the bass singer in a recording session adding much needed “Outer...Space!” backup vocals to the song “Please Mr. Kennedy”. Cody, a clear stand in for real NYC folkie Ramblin’ Jack Elliot bears the decidedly less cowboy-sounding government name Arthur Milgram, and is such a pushover that he lets the semi-vagrant Llewyn Davis crash on his couch despite knowing him for all of an afternoon. Neither of these men are symbols for the brash bluster that the Coens love their cowboys to represent, but they are a sign of another aspect of their filmmaking, which is “even if it doesn’t necessarily fit in the film, let’s see if we can fit a cowboy in here”. Yes, Hobie Doyle is a kind of Roy Rogers stand in and Al Cody is a very obvious Ramblin’ Jack analogue, but the Coens could have easily had their easily-manipulated blandly handsome actor been a Cary Grant stand-in or a Rock Hudson stand-in for Caesar, and in Llewyn Davis the third voice in the “Please Mr. Kennedy” session could have easily been a Phil Ochs or John Denver analogue. The fact is, Joel & Ethan saw an opportunity to fit a cowboy into their film and they took it.
Three additional cowboys exist in the Coens’ films: oil magnate / secret soap opera actor Howard P. Doyle from Intolerable Cruelty (2003), Sam Elliot’s character “The Stranger” from The Big Lebowski (1998), and disgruntled investor Zebulon Cardoza in The Hudsucker Proxy.
Each of these characters have tenuous reasons for their existence as cowboys in their respective films, and the roles all could easily have existed and driven the story just as well as non-cowboys. For her convoluted scheme to work, Marylin Rexroth needs her fiancé to be someone outside the known Los Angeles high society scene, so an Oklahoma oil man is as good as anything, but a Cleveland power attorney or a Seattle software magnate would have worked just as well. Howard P. Doyle does incorporate some down-home folksiness, expressing that folksiness (and his extreme love for Marylin) by (seemingly) brashly tearing up his prenuptial agreement, so his cowboy-ness adds a little something to the character. The Stranger and Zebulon Cardoza however are there for no good reason. They are a delight, but in no way do they fit. I will not attempt to explain The Stranger’s presence in Lebowski because it cannot be convincingly done. For no good reason the film is narrated by a sarsaparilla drinking cowboy with a magnificent mustache who wishes the Dude wouldn’t cuss so much. It’s pretty amazing. I’ll do what I can for Zebulon though.
Zebulon Cardoza appears on screen in Hudsucker for 41 seconds and is played by Noble Willingham, a Texan TV and character actor best known for playing bar owner and former Ranger captain C.D. Parker on 8 seasons of Walker: Texas Ranger. Brash, loud, and Texan was Willingham’s type, and Cardoza is no exception. His first name “Zebulon”, while it sounds a bit like the name one might give an alien in a sci-fi cartoon, falls in line with southern naming traditions of finding the most unusual Old Testament name you can find and naming your child after them, so while you have plenty of Adams and Davids and Sarahs and Rachels in the south, you also have plenty of Abners and Zekes (short for Ezekiel) and Jebs (short for Jebediah). The biblical Zebulon is the sixth and final son of Jacob and Leah for those curious. Zebulon Cardoza is a stockholder at the Hudsucker Fancy Dress Gala, and is disappointed with how the new president is running the company. He is of course recognizably a cowboy on sight, bearing a stetson hat with decorative silver rivets on the band, string tie, and marvelous mustache, but just in case is were not clear he fits ten pounds of folksy expressions into the five pound bag that is his brief scene. “What’s ailin’ you, boy?” “What you’ve got here son is a range war“ “You’re gonna have to circle our wagons or I’m gonna get out of your wagon train” and of course “Yeller!? Who you callin yeller, boy!”. As with many of the other cowboys alluded to in this essay, Zebulon Cardoza is comically brash and quick to temper, only being restrained by his wife, informing him “you mind now and quit actin’ like such an old grizzly”. Zebulon is never seen or referenced again.
In music, there is a compositional technique called “exoticism”. Starting heavily in the 19th century composers would borrow motifs from folk music traditions of other cultures into otherwise respectable high society music. Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Liszt would use melodic figures from Romani folk dances. Johannes Brahms would use melodic figures from Jewish klezmer music. The pieces are still 100% european classical music*** but have interesting twists that keep them from being the same stale old scales and modes from the past 500 years being rehashed. The practice is also well known in the culinary world. A splash of soy sauce in a bolognese or some irish cultured butter finishing a pad thai can add a delightful unexpected twist to a dish. Joel & Ethan Coen are themselves masters of a different kind of exoticism, of throwing differing elements of unrelated characters, settings, and plot devices in the mix as a kind of unexpected but not unwelcome twist. Noir stories of crimes gone wrong are a dime a dozen, but set one in rural Minnesota in the dead of winter and it’s a masterpiece. There are hundreds of detective mystery movies out there, but only one where the detective is a charming burnout who goes bowling with an unhinged ‘Nam vet. The Odyssey is one of the most retold tales in humanity, but nothing quite makes it as distinct as making it a slapstick comedy where Odysseus is obsessed with his hair. There are dozens of examples of how they’ll do this, but a strikingly thematic one is peppering a scene or two with a cowboy where it doesn’t belong. So just as a tablespoon of fish sauce in your chile verde is an unexpected twist that makes for a little extra deep savory note in the dish, so too does Zebulon Cardoza make for an unexpectedly brash and deeply American note to The Hudsucker Proxy.
*A case could also be made that subsequent US president George W Bush was also a (different kind of) cowboy actor.
** “Wait!” I hear some of you shouting. Did not LaBoeuf fire the shot that did Ned Pepper in? I would point out that unlike the 1969 version of the film, Rooster Cogburn is pinned by his horse but still can get to his weapon, and we only see Pepper fall from a great distance, leaving it ambiguous as to whether he is killed by LaBoeuf or Cogburn. What is definitely true is LaBoeuf did not ride full steam ahead one man to four while screaming “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!” LaBoeuf might get the assist, but Cogburn gets the points.
***European romantic era music if we’re being pedantic.