The Harder They Fall by Hayden Pegg

Reimagining the American Cowboy

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-06 17:08:41 UTC

The Movie "The Harder They Fall" challenges the idea of a white American cowboy using Jonathan Majors' character Nat Love. The reimagination aligns with the course material, specifically the week 9 reading "US Expansionism during the Nineteenth Century: ‘Manifest Destiny". "Americans were able to simultaneously disavow and build an empire thanks to a
mid-nineteenth-century ideology known as Manifest Destiny. In the 1840s Manifest
Destiny accelerated Western settlement and provided a rationale for continued
continental expansion. It cast western expansion as natural and predetermined, and justified a policy of brutal, racially based warfare against both Indian people and Mexicans" (1013). The quote relates to the movie by discussing the violence and racialized powers beneath that myth.

Historical Figures in Fiction

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-06 17:27:54 UTC

The film is not a true story, but it does use real historical figures. The movie fits with our topic of reexamining American history by including genuine historical individuals and fusing fact and fiction to highlight underappreciated Black pioneers of the West. More specifically, this relates to the week 5 reading, "Blackhawk, 'Introduction,' The Rediscovery of America, 2023, 1-11". ". Our history must reckon with the fact that Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and millions of other non-white citizens have not enjoyed the self- evident truths of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed at the nation’s founding as inalienable rights belonging to all" (2). The quote supports Blackhawk's demand for a more comprehensive, inclusive American history by highlighting historically marginalized Black characters in the movie, which revises prevailing historical myths.

Myth of the Lawless West and the “Good Guy”

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-06 18:04:29 UTC

The Wild West's reputation as a place of valiant heroes and acceptable violence is dismantled in The Harder They Fall. It portrays justice as elusive and retaliation as morally complex rather than praising police enforcement. This is similar to Paul Heike's claim in "The Myth of the Founding Fathers" that America frequently fabricates heroic tales to conceal its violent underpinnings. The book and the movie both show how myth-making sanitizes violence in order to preserve a national identity based on moral superiority and conquest. "The myth of the Founding Fathers (like that of the Pilgrims and Puritans) focuses on a group of historical actors; it symbolizes cooperation and interdependence by toning down internal conflicts among those actors and by erasing the contingency of their plans and actions, their local and regional (rather than national) interests, and all sorts of major and minor disagreements" (198). The quote reveals how the myth minimizes power conflicts and tensions to create unity and harmony, exactly what The Harder They Fall does by emphasizing betrayal, retaliation, and disintegration within America's founding myths.

The Promise Land

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-06 18:53:02 UTC

The idea that the West is a Promised Land, a land of opportunity and freedom, is called into question by The Harder They Fall. Rather, it depicts a place where Black people have been excluded and subjected to brutality. This is consistent with Paul Heike's criticism in "Pilgrims and Puritans and the Myth of the Promised Land," which exposes how racial inequalities and colonial brutality were hidden behind the notion of divine destiny. Black characters in the movie had to struggle to survive in a world that was not intended for them, revealing the fallacy of American exceptionalism. " The scriptural story of the Hebrews’ escape from slavery in Egypt and their journey to a new land promised to them by God is one of the most powerful narratives of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This religious narrative was turned into a cultural myth by reconfiguring the ingredients of the biblical story" (139). This examines how colonial invasion was transformed into divine destiny in early American myths, a phenomenon that The Harder They Fall challenges by highlighting who is left out of that promise.

Erasing the Original Inhabitants

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-07 16:57:25 UTC

"The Iroquois Confederacy, founded by the Great Peacemaker in 1142, is the oldest living participatory democracy on earth. In 1988, the U.S. Senate paid tribute with
a resolution that said, 'The confederation of the original 13 colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy" Haudenosaunee Great Law and US Democracy(2). The quote emphasizes the importance of Indigenous political institutions to American democracy, a fact that is sometimes lost in national mythology, much like The Harder They Fall demonstrates how Black presence in the West has been obliterated.

Built on Blood

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-07 17:14:20 UTC

"By 1850 the emphasis was on the American Anglo-Saxons as a separate, innately superior people who were destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to the American continents and to the world"(Horsman 2). The Harder They Fall demonstrates how land seizures, gunfights, and fear-based control were used to establish communities like Redwood. In both myth and fact, the "civilization" of the West entailed the violent removal of non-white people. The movie challenges viewers to consider the frontier as an occupation rather than an opportunity by exposing the true cost of these beliefs.

Myth of Self-Made Men

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-07 19:03:35 UTC

"So if you're white, you know, you can't really make that claim to having been on the sidelines and not a party to this story of exclusion and exploitation, because you have benefited from it" (seeing white part 13). The quote relates to the movie by challenging the myth of self-made success rather than shining light on systemic advantage, which has shaped opportunity in America. The American concept of the "self-made man" is complicated in The Harder They Fall. Nat Love's story is defined by racial injustice, violence, and expropriation rather than by sheer hard work or opportunity.

Who Gets Remembered

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-07 19:20:13 UTC

"From the outset the idea of America has offered the promise of inclusion and struggled with its reality. Increasing recognition of the tension between the promise and the struggle has helped to bring about important social and political changes as it has raised questions about the very idea of America" (Wald 4). The quote aligns with the mission of the film to rediscover the Black histories that were forgotten in the American West. The film rediscovers the memory of Black cowboys who have been excluded from Western culture.

Violence

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-07 19:33:50 UTC

"Aggressive territorial expansion offered the promise to men of asserting their martial (or military) virtues, dominating supposed racial inferiors, and—through dint of their physical strength and courage—winning fertile lands of their own, docile women, and an empire for the United States" (Greenburg 1023). The train attack that liberates Rufus Buck is among the most visually stunning scenes in the movie. With American soldiers serving as its guards, the train, which has the moniker "C.A. Boseman". Railroads, which were seen as signs of development, were instruments of oppression, as this instance scathingly exposes.

Fighting against the norms

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-07 20:34:14 UTC

"But people are surviving despite America. Look, the whole story of people resisting during slavery, they were surviving despite America. It's amazing how in a way people take that and try to like recapture it and redeploy it as like ‘an American story" (Seeing White Part 4). This demonstrates how The Harder They Fall rewrites history so that its characters flourish in opposition to American principles rather than as a result of them. Stagecoach Mary questions the conventional roles that women are expected to play in the Western genre. She fights with the males, manages her own company, and is self-reliant. The idea that the West is a harsh, male-only testing ground is challenged by Mary's character in The Harder They Fall.

Reversal of the Villain

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-07 20:49:41 UTC

"I mean the fact is that there's nothing remotely comparable to these things, this mass killing and violence that has been done by white people against Black people, there's nothing comparable on the other side of the ledger. And yet for centuries now, white folks have been telling ourselves and each other that you all are the ones to be feared" (Seeing White Part 11). This demonstrates how dread is racially allocated and frames Rufus Buck as someone reacting to violent institutions that have long been imposed on Black communities rather than as an exception.

Exclusion

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-07 21:02:18 UTC

"This country’s first Congress said you can come from anywhere in the world and have full citizen’s rights—as long as we see you as white" (Seeing White part 10). The shows how different institutions, such as banks, have been a nuisance in terms of preventing non-white people from participating in American life. In a crucial moment in the film, Cuffee disguises himself as a man to rob a bank in a white community. In an unsettling allegory for exclusion, the town is painted white.

Myth of Equality

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-08 01:30:23 UTC

"Scientists were developing a biological concept of race in order to support white peoples’ conquest and enslavement and exploitation of other peoples" (Seeing White Part 8). Cuffee indicates a history connected to Black military service by wearing a Union army jacket. However, despite her efforts to recover stolen funds, she continues to encounter prejudice and gender discrimination. Scene on Radio: Skulls and Skin, which reveals how structural power persisted in defining race even after emancipation, is reflected in this.

Legacy

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-08 01:35:54 UTC

"Now I understand that the U.S.-Dakota War was the defining event in Minnesota history. It cleared the way for the Minnesota I grew up in, a place populated overwhelmingly by the people who call ourselves white—a world that seemed to me, as a child, utterly natural and inevitable" (Seeing White part 5). In the same way that the U.S.-Dakota War influenced Minnesota's settler destiny, inherited violence shapes the last encounter between Nat Love and Rufus Buck. The passage from Biewen illustrates how violence gives dominant groups more room.

Power

haydenpegg10 — 2025-05-08 02:01:00 UTC

"Its totalitarian framework, based on rigid notions of race and sex, was constructed on this continent plank by plank. That process started not too long after the first African people landed in Jamestown on a Dutch ship in 1619, about twenty people stolen from Angola" (Seeing White Part 3). The quote aligns perfectly with the final act in the film, where the personal violence between Rufus and Nat is exposed as a longer-standing system of trauma and racialized power.