In the course of preparing a presentation on One False Move I discovered I had too many thoughts regarding its portrayal of American cultural myths and how the film represents them to be contained within my discussion. Here is what intrigues me the most regarding the way the film operates as a critique of idealized American fantasy.
On a macro scale, it is a darkly nostalgic pseudo-noir western film. To briefly contextualize, it’s worth noting that the female protagonist and nuevo-femme fatale, Lila, left her small-town home of Star City, to go to Los Angeles and pursue her dream of being an actress. What she found instead was a violent, cokehead boyfriend and an increasingly destructive cycle of drug fueled crime. Just this simple plotline evokes the metropolitan violence and intrigue that marks traditional noir classics, and the American idealism of the west. For Lila, Los Angeles is equivalent to a modern American frontier: a place of seemingly endless possibility for self-improvement or total destruction. When considering the facts of this backstory in connection with the film’s gory opening sequence, a brutal killing spree and robbery, the threads between this film and classic American cinematic traditions are clear to see. However, by drawing upon these archetypes the film is able to critique them.
One of the ways the film frames these critiques is through the character Dale, as played by Bill Paxton. He is the police chief in Star City, but he dreams of being more and potentially someday joining the LAPD. He is in many ways playing the cowboy archetype, except in this film the wild frontier in need of taming is Los Angeles. The “wild west” is now an urban arena, not the wilds of the prairie. He hopes to realize the dreams of the old west colonials by making a name for himself in uncharted territories, but his dream is fantasy, and this much is obvious to everyone but himself. We see this when his wife tells the LA investigators that she “reads nonfiction” while he “watches TV.” His concept of that western ideal is shaped by fiction, much like so many actual Americans. Additionally, his casual racism towards the black characters in the film is reminiscent of the cowboy heroes of yore, except with the context of this film we can see that it is no longer acceptable in the modern world. Dale is a shadowy relic of America’s past who cannot appreciate his own anachronisms.
The most interesting part of this to me is that his character is so fully driven by these maverick ideals that his eventual downfall is precipitated by their influence on his behavior. Instead of calling for backup to adequately bring down Ray and Pluto, he attempts to face them alone as a mythic American gunslinger would. This made me wonder in how many subtle ways fictional narratives have come to influence real ones. Obviously, Dale is a fictional character in a Hollywood film, but his obsession with the Western archetype is echoed in varying ways by many real Americans today. The myth of the frontier is one of our greatest national mythologies, and in the film, it destroys him. I couldn’t help but wonder at how much of our national psychology has been altered by the narratives we see in television and film. We are mimetic creatures by nature, and humans continually reenact and imitate things we see represented on TV, regardless of how ridiculous they might be. Falsely idealized narratives surround us and it can be extremely difficult to determine our place in the increasingly fictionalized world. In the film, Dale certainly couldn’t. Particularly within our current political climate there seems to be a concerted push to return to a past ideal in which America was great, as opposed to today. Nostalgia based fiction is insidious and destructive because it creates a tantalizing false reality which cannot be attained.
When the film is viewed through this light, One False Move presents a surprisingly resonant societal critique of idealized cultural narrative which, unfortunately, seems more poignant by the day.
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