‚She Rides Shotgun‘ and the Making of Legends

Way back in 2006, David Milch, the writer and producer of the HBO show “Deadwood,” sat down for an interview with American Heritage. He explained how the show was meant as a deconstruction of the old cowboy mythos that had dominated popular culture for a chunk of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly Western movies. Key quote:

“I’ve never really understood or cared for the conventions of the Western. I always thought they had more to do with what the Hays Office would allow than with what happened on the American frontier. The more I came to read about the West, the more I realized how little what we called Westerns had to do with the West and how much they had to do with the vision of European Jews in the movie business who made a fortune selling a sanitized idea of American history back to America.”

At least in the context of TV and film, those old Hollywood producers had not only subverted history but also transformed it into new myth. Outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid were elevated from illiterate killers into paragons of freedom, pushing back bravely against authority. Fictional cowboys like the Lone Ranger or John Wayne’s Ringo Kid showed that you could “tame” the West, eliminate evil, and protect widows and orphans with some well-placed gunshots. Americans love a righteous avenger who pulverizes everything in his path without asking too many thorny questions.

There was cultural pushback, of course, starting as early as “The Searchers” (1956). By the late 1960s, you had Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and a bunch of other films deconstructing the Western mythos, extending all the way through “Unforgiven” (1992) and beyond. On the crime-film side of the equation, there’s a simultaneous track of movies that subvert the righteous avenger narrative—my personal favorite is “Drive” (2011), which shows that someone willing to deliver bone-crunching violence to protect the weak is likely a dead-eyed psychopath.

I’m thinking a lot about this because I just watched “She Rides Shotgun,” the new big-screen adaptation of Jordan Harper’s crime novel. The book is a masterpiece, the kind of literary thriller that makes other authors jealous. Its plot is simple: Polly McClusky, 11 years old, is forced to go on the run with her ex-con father, Nate McClusky, when the latter’s enemies (which include a White Supremacist gang and, eventually, a bunch of crooked cops) decide to wipe his family off the face of the planet. The rural California backdrop of rundown motels and trucker churches and trailer-park meth labs gives the proceedings a neo-Western feel, similar to “No Country for Old Men.”

On a thematic level, the book is brilliant because it plays with those all-American archetypes that extend back to the early Westerns. Nate is a righteous avenger, sure, but also a deeply flawed human being who’s doing his best to keep the last good thing in his life alive. And at the end, he ascends to a similar legendary status as the outlaws of old, a boogeyman that people whisper about, everywhere and yet nowhere.

The movie chucks the part about legends. It also deletes many of the subplots and set-pieces that give the book its texture. In a way, you can’t fault it for that; you can only stuff so much into two hours. But in the end product, you can catch glimpses of what might have been: a rare opportunity to mash together the gritty California of “Drive” and the gunmetal morality of a Peckinpah film with (at the end) the epic myth-making of “The Searchers” or even the finale of “El Cid.”

I don’t want to make it seem like I’m denigrating the movie. The acting is spectacular, particularly the relationship between Taron Egerton as Nate and Ana Sophia Heger as Polly. There are some solid sequences, including a gas station robbery that escalates into a brutal car chase on a nighttime highway. If you’re a fan of crime movies, and you haven’t read the source material, you’ll probably like it. For those who’ve fallen in love with the novel, though, you might be left wanting something more.

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Nick Kolakowski is the author of several crime novels, including “Where the Bones Lie”, “Payback is Forever”, „Maxine Unleashes Doomsday“ and „Boise Longpig Hunting Club“ as well as the Love & Bullets trilogy of novellas. His work has been nominated for the Anthony and Derringer awards, and his short story “Scorpions” appeared in The Best Mystery and Suspense 2024. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Mystery Weekly, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and more.

His „Payback is Forever“ (Shotgun Honey 2022) is inspired clearly by the novels of Richard Stark. Our review here (in German). – See also his Hell of a Mess. A Love & Bullets Hookup.

Nick Kolakowski, geboren 1980, aufgewachsen in Washington. D.C., hat Geschichte in Chicago studiert. Er schreibt Romane, Kurzgeschichten, Lyrik und Essays, viele davon über Crime Fiction und verwandte Themen. Seine Texte erscheinen u. a. in der Washington Post, in Shotgun Honey, North American Review, The Evergreen Review, Rust & Months. Kolakowski lebt in New York City. Eine Besprechung des von Parker inspirierten „Payback is Forever“ in unseren Bloody Chops.

Bei Suhrkamp auf Deutsch: Love & Bullets.
His essays with us. 

His website nickkolakowski.com

His column „Smoking Gun“ with us: 
‘Salem’s Lot’ and the Horror of a Stephen King Adaptation
(27) „Rebel Ridge“: Calmly Burn the Whole Thing Down
‘Monsieur Spade’ and the Faustian Bargain
John Woo is Remaking ‘The Killer.’ But Why?
The Newest ‘Ripley’ Series is Stunning and Flawed
‘Sugar’: Not the Neo-Noir Revival We Need
(3) Moral Redemption in Noir: Is It Possible?
(4) What Makes Jack Reacher Tick?
(5) ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Tries to Make the Familiar into Something New
(6) Is David Fincher’s ‘The Killer’ a Comedy? 
(7) Rewatching ‘Drive’: Gosling as Noir’s Apex Predator
(8) Elmore Leonard  – City Primeval
(9) Cormac McCarthy Used Crime Fiction’s Tropes to Make Masterpieces
(10) Parker: Donald Westlake’s One Amazing Trick
(11) Cosby, Winslow, Pruitt: Three Heavy-Hitting Thillers for Summer
(12) Weed-Based Crime Thrillers are Going Up in Smoke
(13) ‘The Last of Us’: Crime in the Post-Apocalypse 
(14) What Made “Glass Onion” and “Knives Out” So Popular?
(15) Jordan Harper’s One-Two Punch of Crime Fiction Deserves a Wide Audience
(16) ‘True Detective’ Season 2: Was It Better Than We All Thought?
(17) From ‘Touch of Evil’ to ‘True Detective,’ Long Shots are Crime Films’ Secret Weapon
(18) Michael Mann, again: What Michael Mann Teaches Us About Enduring Crime Fiction
(19) „Heat 2“ – How Do You Craft a Sequel to a Masterpiece?
(20) 4 Ways Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” Novel Stands Out From the Film.
(21) On „Heat“: Manhunter Takes Down Thief: How Michael Mann’s Early Career Led to ‘Heat’
(22) The Most Honest Nihilism – on „The Way of the Gun“
(23) No, Time to Die – The latest James Bond movie digs into the fatalism at the iconic spy’s core.
(24) Cormac McCarthy’s Overlooked Masterpiece? – „The Councelor“
(25) „Nightmare Alley“ – How Guillermo del Toro’s Film Alters a Masterpiece Noir Novel
(26) David Cronenberg – The Carnal Crime of “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises”
(27) With Parker, Donald E. Westlake Pulled Off Crime Fiction’s Most Spectacular Magic Trick
(28) Guy Ritchie’s Return to Crime Films is Worth Watching
(29) Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’: Hint of Things to Come?
(30) David Lynch and the Beautiful Weirdness
(31) ‘Where the Bones Lie’ and the Engine of California Noir
(32) “Den of Thieves 2”: Stealing from the Best
(33) White Lotus and the Gentle Art of Hating Your Protagonists
(34) Neal Stephenson
(35) Where is Storytelling Going?