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The British mini-series “The Englishwoman” was released on the Amazon Prime Video service, where America during the development of the Wild West is shown as hell on earth.
“In the world of Westerns, all women are good, only men are bad,” film theorist Andre Bazin once wrote in a keynote article on the Western. Since then, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge and revisionist westerns have repeatedly violated the laws of the genre. But even among them, the new series The Englishwoman stands out because it was made by British showrunner Hugo Bleek with no affinity for American history. “This is an insightful look at the brutality that has been ingrained in American identity since the beginning,” wrote an IndieWire critic. And the point here is not even that women are good and men are bad, but that the brave pioneers pushing the frontier further and further west are not just bad here, but terrible.
The first creepy character encountered in the Wild West by visiting Englishwoman Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) is the owner of a hotel – more precisely, a hut in the middle of the prairie – Mr. Watts (Kieran Hinds). “There are many people here who will welcome you to real America, but only one will do it sincerely,” he will introduce himself at the meeting. After some half an hour, we learn that he wants to rape, kill and rob an Englishwoman who has a large amount of cash with her, and this phrase will sparkle with new colors. But the Englishwoman will be lucky: she will be saved by the noble Pawnee Indian Eli Whipp (Chesk Spencer). At first, Eli does not want to take a woman as a fellow traveler – she crossed the ocean to take revenge on some villain for the death of her child, and such sensitive matters have not interested him for a long time. But fate still brings them together, because it knows that they have a common enemy. Even when they seem to be separated forever, at a critical moment he will still appear out of nowhere, just like Said in the Soviet western “White Sun of the Desert”: “How did you end up here?” – “They shot.”
This guy had served in the Northern Army in the Civil War, carefully turning away when his fellow soldiers brutally cracked down on the Indians, because the hostile Pawnee tribes became the target. And now he just wants to get 60 acres of land in Nebraska and start a new life there. This land belongs to him by right twice – as a native American and as a veteran of her army. But everyone who crosses his path says he won’t get the lot just because he’s not white.
The veterinarian she met along the way will explain this well to Cornelia by a scientific example when they talk about Darwin and cowpox. The doctor has practically invented a panacea – vaccinations: “If you put a dead parasite in the body, it will remember it and then recognize the living one and turn on the protection. And what the body does to parasites, society can do to Indians!” – “Murder?” the Englishwoman is horrified. “Assimilation! replies the smart veterinarian. “If you want to survive in the world of whites, you need to become the same.” (By the way, in a few minutes the veterinarian will be shot.) Medicine in general is of great interest to the showrunner – by the series finale, one of the misfortunes that destroys his heroes is syphilis. Well, how can one remain a good person when the frontier and syphilis, syphilis and the frontier are all around. Wednesday is gone!
Hugo Bleek doesn’t like compromise at all. Everyone gets it from him, including the English: one of the heroes will not fail to express to Cornelia how her vile compatriots spread rot on the Scots. She herself has no illusions about America and still hopes for the best: “It cannot be that only scoundrels and thieves live in this country.” Bleek treats this topic separately: the main reptiles of his western are the white conquerors of the Wild West. But there is, for example, a bad old Indian: he cannot feed himself from the meager piece of land that the government gave him, and works as a gunner for a bandit gang that kills settlers. There is, contrary to the film theorist Bazin, even a bad woman, the terrible Black-Eyed Mog (Nicola McAuliffe), a lover of scalps – she just once suffered at the hands of no less cruel people. It is not in vain that the series is about 1890, when the development of the Wild West was completed and the frontier as such practically ceased to exist. But the action always goes back 15 years to show how all these bad people came to such a life. And so: according to the laws of the frontier, the horizon is constantly receding, and what previously seemed unthinkably cruel, now does not seem. And the land – yesterday it was someone else’s, but today it’s yours. But there is another law of the frontier, about which the Indian Eli warns Cornelia: “There is a difference between what we want and what we need. Everything you need can be taken with you on a horse, if necessary.
And yet the author of the series, Hugo Bleek, is trying to do what he condemns his heroes for – to stake out someone else’s territory, the western genre itself. After the credits, footage of the silent film of 1899 “Kidnapping by the Indians”, filmed in England, will appear in the series – marvel, people: the British came up with the western!
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