Popular Culture Review Vol. 15, No. 1 | Page 34

30 Popular Culture Review sociocultural point of view from much of his previous (and later) work; it’s a rare film in his canon in which the protagonist happily ends up exactly where he wants with very little compromise, including no acceptance whatsoever of urban industrialism. Remarkably, considering the film takes place in Ireland and not the American West, close examination reveals that the cultural conflict between urbanism and agrarianism is just as present here as it is elsewhere in Ford’s work. Just as in other films of his major period there is a clear winner in the battle between urban and rural; in The Quiet Man, however, the winner is the rural agrarianism of our most sentimentally pastoral dreams. Although it takes place in Ireland, The Quiet Man is nevertheless an American fantasy, with Ireland serving as the mythical frontier land beyond city limits that Americans, even today, desperately want to believe still exists. We should pay much more attention than we’ve been willing to pay to this remarkable film. Tellingly, the film begins with a train cutting across the amazingly beautiful Irish countryside (Ford was accused of having painted the fields, but if he did, he never admitted it [Gallagher 283]). The train recalls the stagecoach at the beginning of several Ford films, including Stagecoach and Fort Apache. Regardless of the similarities, that it is a train and not a stagecoach changes things. In Ford’s other works, the stagecoach is a sign of an encroaching era, a precursor of quickly approaching industrialism. But a train, especially in The Quiet M an3s idealized rural landscape, signals that the industrial age has already arrived. By starting with a train Ford has placed us in a time, though not necessarily a place, in which we can assume the idea of a further frontier has been long since dead. This opening scene features a literal manifestation of what Leo Marx calls “the machine in the garden,” which he illustrates by citing a July 27, 1844, Nathaniel Hawthorne journal entry, in which Hawthorne records his thoughts during a morning reverie. In it, Hawthorne joyously, and seemingly without irony, recounts the sound of a train barreling through the idyllic rural landscape. This scene served as a precursor to the eventually common literary trope of a machine’s sudden appearance in the landscape, famous examples of which include Thoreau’s hearing a train whistle along with a hawk’s cry in Walden, Moby-Dick3s Ishmael seeing a whale’s skeleton morph into a New England textile mill before his very eyes, Whitman’s flawless intermingling of seemingly contradictory industrial and rural imagery in “Song of Myself,” and the steamboat smashing through the middle of Huck and Jim’s raft in Adventures o f Huckleberry Finn. Marx writes that Hawthorne’s notes “mark the shaping of a metaphoric design which recurs everywhere” in American literature (15-16). Not only does this metaphoric design occur in American literature, it recurs throughout the films of John Ford. Although Ford’s parents were Irish immigrants, he was nevertheless bom in America and, accordingly, spent his cinematic career grappling with his