The Proposition

This article explores the relationship between two films, Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter, 1976) and Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), using intertextuality as its theoretical cornerstone. Our concern is to understand how intertextuality allows us to see Stagecoach “living on”, as termed by Jacques Derrida, in Assault and, in turn, how Assault reconstitutes meaning in/of/through Stagecoach. The pairing of Assault and Stagecoach may seem, at first glance, incongruous, or perhaps, as Derrida suggests, “an ironical exercise”; perhaps this very incongruity is a product of genre conventions, of being told what we are to see. We will map these films to each other throughout this article, and suggest that the meanings that are constructed through and by Assault and Stagecoach can be considered meditations on the larger social and historical stories of American life and, specifically, concerns of community and belonging – who belongs inside and outside, what is worth defending and why, and, ultimately, whether American ideals of equality and democracy can ever become a reality. Intertextuality helps us to understand how film representations have grappled with these concepts of American citizenship over time and across significant historical change. It also helps us to move away from binary interpretations of a film’s political message, instead enabling us to account for ambiguity, complexity and multiple meanings within filmic texts.

Intertextuality was a term coined in the 1960s by Julia Kristeva. It refers to a mode of analysis that is inherently political in nature. It reassigns the locus of textual meaning from the author to the reader, thereby democratizing meaning-making and multiplying the voices that can participate in it. More than this, though, Kristeva emphasizes that, rather than applying social or historical lenses of analysis over a text, social and historical processes are also texts, stories enmeshed within textual relationships.¹ In other words, as William Irwin, summarizes, “society and history are not elements external to textuality, to be brought to bear in interpretation. Rather, society and history are themselves texts, and so are already and unavoidably inside the textual system.”² In this light, intertextuality is an apt mechanism to explore the mutually constituted political meanings of Assault and Stagecoach. Moreover, intertextuality allows us to understand how films can hold multiple, even contradictory, political meanings at the same time by recognizing that viewers themselves make meaning through texts from subjectivities that can and do hold complex, ambiguous or contradictory identifications.³

This is an important reorientation of existing debates in academic scholarship regarding the political meanings of Assault on Precinct 13 and the theoretical tools we use to arrive at those meanings. Existing scholarship points out how Assault’s meaning is impacted by its place in the history of the genre tropes it employs and, in turn, how the history of genre shapes our understanding of Assault.⁴ Assault sits at the intersection of three genres – Westerns, horror and blaxpoitation – and current scholarship examines how the political meanings of the film can be gleaned from its explicit and implicit textual references to films within those genres, especially to Westerns and horror. For example, Kendall R. Phillips notes that “Assault is in many ways a Western set in modern times” and discusses its use of Western genre tropes, for example, in the parallel between gang violence and the dehumanized and faceless representation of Native Americans in many classical Westerns (such as Stagecoach) to support this assertion.⁵ In his analysis of Assault, Robert Cumbow highlights references to other Western films including, but not limited to, The Searchers, Red River, Once Upon a Time in the West, and The Wild Bunch, and to the various Westerns of Howard Hawks. He also recognizes thematic alignment with other contemporary “urban Westerns”, including The Resurrection of Broncho Billy.⁶

Figure 1:

Street Thunder prepare to attack the Precinct. The representation of the gang is key to understanding Assaulťs relationship to other genres. Assault on Precinct 13, 1976.

For Tony Williams and Cumbow, the locus of meaning in Assault can be found in its references to the horror genre, although they arrive at opposed interpretations of the film. For Williams, “both the past and present generic references of Assault are of crucial value in analysing the film” and, in particular, its references to other horror films – those intentionally constructed by Carpenter and those “transcending the author’s intention” – act to solidify Assault as a “transitional film” in the “decline” of the horror film after the “radical” developments of the previous decade.⁷ The meaning constructed in Assault, the sum of its references, according to Williams, is inherently politically conservative: “the monster”, Street Thunder, is emptied of any complexity or social meaning, and the film is reactionary. Cumbow agrees with the significance Williams places on constructing the political meaning of Assault via its references to and place within genre films, noting that, for all its connections to the Western, “it’s finally a remake more of Night of the Living Dead than of Rio Bravo. In fact, one might trace the ancestry of Assault on Precinct 13 along a direct line from Forbidden Planet through Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds through Night of the Living Dead”.⁸ Cumbow’s conclusions regarding the meaning that such an ancestry constructs are, however, seemingly directly opposed to Williams’; for him, Assault presents a generic transition away from the simplistic moral binaries of earlier horror (and Western) films and towards the representation of a more complex social compact between diverse individuals necessary for the survival of society.

This genre analysis uses concepts intimately connected to intertextuality, although intertextuality is not explicitly mentioned by either author. Yet, we posit, intertextuality complements current theorization of genre, rather than sitting distinct from it.⁹ In particular, contemporary genre studies acknowledge that, at the same time as films attempt to adhere to or represent genre tropes, they always, and at the same time, struggle against those very attempts at neat and strict classification or taxonomy. As Derrida, again, articulates:

a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or free, anarchic, and unclassifiable productivity, but because the trait of the participation itself, because of the effect of the code and the generic mark. Making genre its mark, a text demarcates itself…the clause or floodgate of genre declasses what it allows to be classed. It tolls the knell of genealogy or of genericity, which it however also brings forth into the light of day.¹⁰

While a film may exist as a distinct text, by reproducing, repeating or quoting genre tropes and other films within that genre, it also, and simultaneously, breaks down its own distinctiveness; it moves texts into itself and places itself within other texts.¹¹ In other words, it enmeshes itself both within intertextual relationships with other texts and within larger social and historical textual relationships.

These entangled relationships reflect Derridean concepts of living on and hauntology, which are key to understanding the relationship between Assault and Stagecoach, especially if one seeks to understand the flow of influence in reverse, and against the dominant critical paradigm, that is, to explore how (a reading of) Assault can inform (a reading of) Stagecoach. In his seminal 1977 work, “Living On: Border Lines”, Derrida articulates concepts that are central to modern intertextual analysis, challenging readers to reconsider the supposedly clear lines of demarcation between a text and what is outside the text, a feat he achieves both through the content of his textual analysis and, meaningfully, by complementing the main text (“Living On”) with a single running footnote that sits below the text for the entirety of the article and presents itself, by the end, as a parallel essay (“Border Lines”) both dependent on and independent from its unfootnoted other. His spatial positioning of these texts, and his play with the conventions of how to read texts, prompts the reader to experience the questions that are core to his argument: what sits inside the text and outside? How is meaning made by the interaction between these texts? How are we limited by our adherence to reading conventions? Alternatively put, as Derrida expresses, an intertextual “living on” allows us “to lose sight of any line of demarcation between a text and what is outside it…the text [in this article, Stagecoach and Assault] overruns all the limits assigned to it so far (not submerging or drowning them in an undifferentiated homogeneity, but rather making them more complex, dividing and multiplying strokes and lines)”.¹² Derrida would revisit living on in his later articulation of hauntology, which refers to those “spectral moments” where life carries on, not into death, but into a living on removed from linear and modular concepts of time itself. It is through haunting that we can undertake meaning-making, that is, as a transitory phenomenon, suspended between, both connected to and apart from, fixed binaries (past and present, life and death). It is through sitting with and understanding our ghosts that we grapple with our contemporary inheritance, considering, as Derrida suggests, that haunting revolves around “a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”¹³

Such concepts are core to the meaning that is made by considering the relationship between Assault and Stagecoach. If Cumbow can chart an ancestral line from Assault through the horror genre to Night of the Living Dead, an ancestral line can also be charted from Assault back through the Western. Taking cues from existing scholarship, we can acknowledge that the immediate “father” film is Rio Bravo.¹⁴ Rio Bravo was made as a reaction to the perceived anti-McCarthy message of High Noon.¹⁵ We can see this ancestry plainly in the last half hour of Assault, when Carpenter employs the same technique used in High Noon, allowing the siege to take place and be experienced by the audience in real time.¹⁶ We intend to go further back in this lineage and read the intertextual relationship between Assault and its (thus far unacknowledged) “great-grandfather” film Stagecoach.

The Assault

Assault and Stagecoach are both siege films that pit distinct communities of people against one another. Both films begin by following three lines of narrative and these lines converge upon the titular spaces (or pseudo-titular, as “Precinct 13” does not actually exist in the film). Assault on Precinct 13 begins by following: an African American police officer, Lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker), who takes command of the about-to-be-decommissioned Anderson Police Station; Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), a prisoner, who is on a transport bus when a fellow prisoner falls ill and the crew is forced to seek shelter at Anderson; and Lawson (Martin West), a father who, after witnessing the murder of his daughter, takes revenge, murdering the gang member responsible. A semi-catatonic Lawson then seeks refuge in the police station, to which the gang, Street Thunder, lay siege to kill him. These lines of narrative converge on the Anderson Police Station, Precinct 9, Division 14.

Figure 2:

Bishop arrives at Anderson Police Station (note the signage reads ‘Anderson Police Station Division 14’). Assault on Precinct 13, 1976.

In Stagecoach, the first narrative line follows those passengers boarding the coach at Tonto, intending to travel to Lordsburg. The passengers, like the defenders of Anderson Police Station, comprise disparate individuals, including, amongst others, a prostitute, Dallas, and an alcoholic medic, Doc Boone; Lucy, a pregnant cavalry officer’s wife, who is trying to find him before the birth of their baby; and Hatfield, a gambler and ex-Confederate. The second line of narrative is presented by “Ringo” (John Wayne), who intercepts the stagecoach and joins its community. He is a prison escapee intent on getting to Lordsburg to avenge his father and brother, who were murdered by the Plummer brothers. The last line of narrative is the threat that Apaches, led by Geronimo, will attack the stagecoach, which they do, and the fear that the cavalry will not protect them, which proves unfounded (although, like the police in Assault, they are late to the party). As in Assault, the disparate members of the community formed in the titular spaces are forced to overcome their differences in defence of each other to survive the attack.

The community that is formed, both in the stagecoach and Anderson, is precarious because it faces division from within – along gender, racial, class and regional lines – and attacks from without, by Apaches and Street Thunder, respectively. Complicating matters is the fact that members of these communities are also positioned as “outsiders” in their communities of origin. Across both films we see a collection of people who sit outside of traditional power structures: a prostitute, an alcoholic, a gambler, prisoners, failed parental figures unable to care for their children, an African American police officer risen from the very “ghetto” he polices, and women in a male-dominated police/frontier environment. Beyond similarity in narrative structure, the films construct characters that map one onto another, presenting and representing these characterizations between the films and across time and space. The thematic overlaps between these films are summarized in the table below and discussed further throughout this article. This mapping of characters one onto another demonstrates a “living on”, or capacity for texts to overrun clear boundaries that demarcate both characters and themes (within a film and between films) and discrete film texts from one another. Indeed, one wonders when we view these overlaps, whether the stagecoach’s final destination is not Lordsburg but, rather, Anderson Police Station, with a cast of characters and a set of problems little changed by time.

In addition to mapping tropes and characters one onto another, there are other textual qualities that make both films apt for “living on”. Generically, Western films re/present movement: indeed, they present transitional zones via the creation and crossing of literal borders, the constant redrawing of “new” frontiers, and heroes who often explicitly reject confinement within borders in favour of the continual search for the next frontier. These stories, then, present concepts synonymous with discussions of intertextuality, of moving across or living on borderlines. Geographical borders in Westerns also stand in for metaphorical or allegorical borders, representing larger concepts regarding civilization and wilderness, confinement and freedom, individualism and communalism, inside and outside, and the value propositions those categories present. The frontier, then, represents the transitional or liminal zone of “living on”, a suspension between two states of being, a site where meaning is grappled with.

This liminality plays out in both films at the level of the narrative, notably in their inconclusive conclusions. In Stagecoach, Dallas and Ringo leave together in a wagon to go “across the border”, but the camera doesn’t follow them; rather, the closing shots are of the men left behind, reflecting ambiguously upon how the couple may be “saved from the blessings of civilization.” Dallas and Ringo are thus captured between two states, never quite leaving Lordsburg or getting across the border, neither saved together (alive) nor damned with the “civilized” (or dead). Likewise, the defenders of Anderson are not shown outside of the station once the siege has concluded – as in the case of Dallas and Ringo, their leaving is implied: Bishop and Napoleon walk up the stairs towards the exit, but they exist in this suspension. They comment that it “would” be nice to leave together, but they never actually do.

Both films are equally suspended at the level of the diegesis. The title “Stagecoach” overarches Ford’s text, encircling it paratextually, in effect besieging it. Diegetically, however, the film extends beyond the metonymic stagecoach story, or the titular story-within-the-story (lifting the siege and, ultimately, challenging its polarization of besiegers and besieged): when Ringo reaches the end of the line, his duel with the Plummers awaits, and this narrative is allowed to play out, extending Stagecoach and taking it beyond itself.¹⁷ The oneiric nature of this lengthy afterword is explained by this haunting that it offers of its own text. In other words, it is the (substantial, even overbearing) other, or borderline, to the titular diegesis’s self. If Ringo’s own literal “living on” is a question mark at the end of the film, the effect of his storyline, diegetically, is to place the stamp of Derridean “living on” over the entire film. Assault, ending with its heroes suspended on the stair, is just as unfinished in diegetic terms as Stagecoach. There is also a way in which the two films come together (in an ostensibly generically disparate community) in their open-endedness. Whereas the titular element of Stagecoach, or the stagecoach text en abyme, is pure mobility, and its extended ending a mixture of absent action and oneiric departure, Assault on Precinct 13’s movement occurs in the three lines of convergence that, as noted above, form its extended introduction. Not only does the film’s titular scene, or the assault itself, not concern “Precinct 13”, but it also marks the end, or a virtual “living on”, of movement. In this mirroring of their respective failures to coincide with themselves, both narratively and diegetically, the two films coincide with each other, with Stagecoach living on as Assault on Precint 13, and vice versa.

Importantly, then, the stagecoach and Anderson Police Station are both presented as transitional spaces. This is explicitly acknowledged in Assault: when Bishop receives instructions to take command of the about-to-be-de-commissioned police station, he is instructed that it is open, but not really. Even when the siege is underway and the double doors are barricaded, a significant gap between them remains, which signifies this as a liminal space, a closing down that is also an opening up, and a closure suggestive of movement, both inwards and outwards.

Figure 3:

Leigh and Julie look out of the station. Though barricaded light is visible through the doors and the windows are completely unshielded and transparent. Assault on Precinct 13, 1976.

Likewise, the stagecoach presents the illusion of an enclosed structure, but it is also, at the same time, both open and mobile. Both are also sites simultaneously encroaching and being encroached upon. In Stagecoach, the stage is both besieged by Apaches and a symbol of the white colonization of an ever-moving frontier, and thus metonymic of an assault on the occupied lands of First Nation Peoples. In Assault, the opening scenes depict Street Thunder members being shot by police as they appear to flee. The police radio positions audiences to understand that a “war” is ongoing between police and gang forces, and the police station exists in a “ghetto”. In this context, while the station is besieged, it is also and at the same time emblematic of a police presence that is assaultive, an assault that is historical, as we soon discuss. In this way, Street Thunder’s assault is as much about the police broadly as it is about seeking revenge on Lawson specifically.

Figure 4:

Like Anderson, the stagecoach is a structure both open and closed. Stagecoach, 1939.

The films also present liminal zones that are temporal in addition to spatial. In Assault, Leigh and Napoleon make reference to being “out of time” and “born out of time”, respectively, and when Bishop enquires about the nature of Napoleon’s name, Napoleon responds that he will tell him “sometime…make that a minute or two”, but he never tells him. The audience sees that the address of Anderson is 1977, a street number, but also a number that is one year ahead of the film’s release, making Anderson itself a place that sits strangely outside of time (in a precinct that doesn’t exist, a paradoxically “placeless place”).¹⁸ Also, the full address of Anderson Police Station is 1977 Ellendale Place, which was Carpenter’s previous address, making Anderson a place both real and imaginary, both owned by Carpenter and disowned by him.¹⁹

Figure 5:

Anderson is a liminal space. Assault on Precinct 13, 1976.

For its part, Stagecoach takes place in a clear historical period: textual references position the film after the American Civil War and before Geronimo’s final surrender, or sometime between 1865 and 1886. However, Doc Boone discusses the events of Stagecoach in terms that sit outside of time, referring to the head of the Law and Order League as “fair Helen [of Troy]”, to Dallas as “Madame La Comtesse” in reference to the French Revolution, and to birthing babies as something that happened “once upon a time” rather than an activity he still does and, indeed, that happens in the film. Will Wright asserts that one of the most important contributions of Stagecoach was introducing Monument Valley as the setting of Western films.²⁰ For Leonard Engel, Monument Valley in Stagecoach was Ford’s “signature landscape that might well be understood as mythic space”. Engel notes that Ford “dramatized through the imagery of space and openness…and confinement and enclosure” and that “the tiny stagecoach and the open landscape of Monument Valley juxtapose the enclosed and open”.²¹ As with Anderson Police Station, the stagecoach and its movement through Monument Valley are liminal zones, within but outside of time, real but mythic, owned by Ford but belonging to no one. These are liminal spaces that signal texts open to meaning creation via other texts; they are also texts capable of making their own meaning and reversing the directional flow, of reciprocating and mutually creating meaning with other texts. Alternatively put, one can, as previously suggested, understand Stagecoach through Assault, and Assault through Stagecoach.

Figure 6:

Stagecoach’s backdrop was Monument Valley, which became a signature of Ford’s and a part of Western history. Stagecoach, 1939.

This conceptualization of time is central to Derridean concepts of hauntology and to seeing intertextuality as a mechanism to make sense of history. Derrida wrote that a spectral moment “no longer belongs to time” as it is understood in Western societies; instead, “off its hinges, time is off course, beside itself, disadjusted”.²² While the spectral moment is a liminal and transitory one, likewise the spectral origin of this transition is temporally disorienting: “off its hinges”, then, the source of this change, the transitory moment

has its provenance in what, by essence, has not yet come-from, still less come about, and which therefore remains to come. The passage of this time of the present comes from the future to go toward the past, toward the going of the gone.²³

Each film just as clearly presents liminal space (as space) for meaning-making. This space assists in understanding the political meaning of the films, previously discussed by Williams and Cumbow. Both films are about the making of American communities when viewed in isolation; when viewed intertextually, Assault and Stagecoach provide political insight into the making and unmaking of American communities over time. Despite being produced decades apart and in remarkably different political and cultural contexts, both films convey a deeply ambivalent attitude toward American communities and the ideas about, and ideals of, American democracy that underpin them. Derrida’s hauntology encourages us to do more, though, to see time not as linear and fixed, but as collapsable and slippery, to see not just Stagecoach “living on” in Assault but also to see how Assault allows for a rereading of Stagecoach.²⁴ Such flexibility is also reflected in the reading (or viewing) of texts; spectators may not experience films across the course of decades but rather experience texts through various temporal relationships that embrace non-linearity.

The Inheritance

“One never inherits without coming to terms with…some specter,” Derrida notes.²⁵ The inconclusive conclusions of Stagecoach and Assault, with their characters stuck in a purgatory of living on, reflect communities unable to move on because they are not fully realized – they have not grappled with their ghosts in order either to live fully, or to die and be reborn anew. What haunts these films? Both films are set in the periods following the First and Second American Reconstructions; they take the idealism of these Reconstructions, and their potential to construct more inclusive, democratic communities and modes of citizenship, and examine the failures, ambiguities and complexities of enacting these principles. They do so to the extent that both films reflect on the larger social issue of American life: the failure to grapple with oppressive social structures that have marginalized people of colour, the poor and women, and to arrive at a whole American community. They play with this concept, exploring its possibilities by forming and modelling what a different form of community may look like (within the stagecoach and within Anderson) without its ever being fully realized (the community cannot be sustained outside the structures that hold it). In other words, these films grapple with the ways America is haunted by colonialism, racism and oppression, without pointing to any real systemic transformation that may lead to more sustainable, inclusive forms of community.

Stagecoach was released to a world on the brink of total war and in recovery from complete economic collapse. The New Deal, Roosevelt’s sweeping response to the Great Depression, had ushered in “a new form of individualism … in which individual identity and agency is dependent on the regenerative powers of the collective experience”.²⁶ However, according to John Belton, this notion of community was itself a myth, one that eased anxiety about growing alienation and disempowerment owing to an increasingly “industrialized, commodified [and urbanized] mass society”.²⁷ The tensions lying behind the ideology of the New Deal – between to meet shared obligations to community, including the poor and marginalized, within a system that privileged market capitalism, the rights of the individual, and white patriarchy – indicate the challenge of translating changed historical conditions into a substantive transformation in American ideology, one that paves the way for a new and more inclusive definition of American community. This challenge is re-presented in Stagecoach, where the “major communities … are all dystopian. Each has failed to realize the potential of what could have been”.²⁸ Ultimately, Dallas and Ringo represent the true possibility of an American family and the construction of a community that realizes American democratic values; and yet, this too is a deeply flawed proposition. Pre-eminent Western film scholar Edward Buscombe asserted that the finale of Stagecoach is “believable only because we don’t actually see it.”²⁹ What we do see is Ringo and Dallas departing in a wagon, heading for Ringo’s ranch “over the border”, following his victory in the duel against the Plummers. We do not see the duel itself, and the narrative of the film has established that there is no possible way for Ringo to survive it: the Plummers and their hands are too numerous. Indeed, so certain is Ringo’s death that the newspapers have already written the story of his demise. There escape is caused by fraud committed when Curly, the Marshal, renounces the law and allows them leave, once again in transit to a destination we never experience. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford would repeat the idea that the ideal American community can only be realized via fraud, articulated famously by the news editor’s assertion: “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.³⁰

Such a view changes, in turn, what it means to be the hero within these narratives. As David Bosworth notes, “In a film energized by many ironies, this might be the fiercest one of all: in John Ford’s revival of our frontier myth, America’s foundational hero not only must ride out of town at the end of the day – he is forced to flee America itself”.³¹ Not only is America’s foundational hero forced to flee America, but all institutions throughout the film also fail: Tonto is lorded over by a Law and Order League led by a woman whose husband is an embezzler and who expels the inherently good Dallas; Lordsburg is essentially lawless, and Curly renounces the law when forced to choose between enforcing its letter or its spirit; Lucy’s presentation as a failed mother unable even to hold her baby, Little Coyote, and the absence of her injured soldier-husband cast doubt on the safety of the nuclear family; and the stagecoach passengers doubt that the cavalry will be able to assist them and, indeed, they arrive late to the rescue. In an understated inversion of the very genre tropes that this film is commonly viewed to have helped birth, Apaches, and not the cavalry, save white womanhood, albeit accidentally, by shooting Hatfield with an arrow just as he is about to execute Lucy, rather than allow her to be captured or killed.³²

Assault’s release also coincided with significant ruptures in ideas of American community. The film’s setting (Los Angeles) and theme (urban gangs) connect to the country’s experience of urban riots, which occurred throughout the US and whose significance cannot be overstated. Urban riots drew attention to the experiences and conditions of, in particular, the poor and people of colour in American cities and created a parallel discourse with the Civil Rights Movement’s focus on non-violent, legalistic reform with appeals for support to white liberals and moderates. Instead, urban riots highlighted systemic and institutionalized racism, including over-policing and police brutality, for which there had been no adequate solution and which boiled over into violence. This period marked the shattering of community (and many foundational American myths) as the limitations of the Second American Reconstruction were felt through events such as the splintering of the liberal consensus, conservative backlash to the gains of many domestic civil rights campaigns, the defeat in Vietnam and the disillusionment caused by Watergate.³³

Figure 7:

The opening scenes of Assault show what we assume are gang members massacred by anonymous police snipers from rooftops. Assault on Precinct 13, 1976.

As in Stagecoach, Assault’s communities are dystopian; as a police officer asserts: “There are no heroes anymore, just men who follow orders”. Again as in Stagecoach, major institutions have failed: fathers cannot protect their daughters or themselves; the police cannot protect their own, arriving too late to defend the precinct effectively, and are shown to be inept, corrupt and violent; gang life offers no meaningful social alternative to mainstream institutions, and Street Thunder members die broken against a sign that reads “Support Your Local Police”; and seemingly good men like Napoleon still wind up on death row. Defence of the liminal space (the stagecoach and Anderson) is incomplete in both films – although both structures endure, the communities that are formed in them only remain communities for as long as they are both inside and under threat from outside. As soon as this threat is removed, they cease to operate as idealised communities and the individuals within them disband.

Figure 8:

Signage is used in the mise en scene to guide the viewer. In this instance the signage literally protects the local police, acting as a shield upon which Street Thunder members die. Assault on Precinct 13, 1976.

Assault takes the characters presented in Stagecoach, and the promise that somewhere, with Ringo and Dallas, a new and more inclusive brand of American society will be born, and reexamines them in light of the historical change that has occurred in the intervening period. Instead of affirming that historical transformation has occurred, it highlights continuity: there is no sustained social compact. Indeed, the hope symbolized by Little Coyote’s birth has turned, by Assault, into the murder of Kathy and, in turn, the death of hope. The intertextual relationship between Stagecoach and Assault highlights the continuity of the search for a more meaningful and inclusive American community, which has not come to fruition despite enormous historical change over time; rather, “the hero narrative is fraudulent…he is a false agent of a false solidarity.”³⁴ This complicates Cumbow’s assertion that the political meaning of Assault lies in the diverse nature of the precinct’s defenders and their capacity to develop a social compact from which a new and more inclusive society can be formed. On the contrary, an intertextual view allows us to understand that the concern over how to incorporate “others” into a cohesive whole is a long-standing part of the American story, one without clean and neat resolutions, one that is in the process of always becoming but which is never realized, one that exists in a state of open-endedness, just like the films themselves.

While Cumbow finds political meaning in Assault via the precinct’s defenders, Williams asserts that the political meaning in the film is to be found in the representation of Street Thunder, and particularly the racial dynamics at play in this portrayal. Williams notes that Carpenter’s portrayal of the gang as “evil”, mindless and divorced from a social or racial context, akin to the representation of Native Americans in classic “Cowboy and Indian” Westerns, has “highly disturbing” implications. In essence, he suggests that the film is “unconsciously reactionary” and politically conservative.³⁵ It is clear that Carpenter drew on genre tropes from the Western in his construction of Street Thunder: in Stagecoach, the Apaches cut the telegraph lines preventing communication between white townships; they “pick off” strays that leave white encampments; and ambiguity exists regarding when and how they will attack. The Apaches attack the stagecoach en masse. All of these elements are (re-)present(ed) in the portrayal of Street Thunder and both Ford and Capenter have been criticized for perceived racial insensitivity in these films.³⁶ However, when we view Assault intertextually and acknowledge that Carpenter is using genre tropes consciously, we must also acknowledge that this film exists in a time when the audience’s understandings of race have been mediated by texts that have consciously sought to renegotiate the meaning of the frontier by presenting First Nations Peoples as the besieged, not the besiegers. Likewise, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War had, by 1976, fundamentally altered notions of American heroism. In this context, it is possible to perceive Street Thunder as both a recognized and problematic trope of classical Westerns deployed in new and complex ways that raise questions about who is classed as an insider, inside of what, and where the side of right lies.³⁷

From this vantage point, we can also look back and reconsider the racial representation in classical Westerns such as Stagecoach. As Peter Yacavone notes, another irony of Stagecoach is that “although Native Americans are crudely instrumentalized as threats that draw the community together – an all too typical positioning of Others, which ultimately encourages their disenfranchisement – Ford’s idiosyncratic fantasy of utopia is also located in their world, not inside the civilized boundaries of white hierarchies.”³⁸ Moreover, Yacavone questions the extent to which Ford, trained in silent films and therefore adept at using film techniques rather than dialogue to convey point of view, was not necessarily portraying his own prejudice, but rather conveying the prejudice of the film’s characters, who are unable to see “the Apaches as human beings”.³⁹ Indeed, two of the most startling moments in the film come when we learn that Hatfield, identified in the film as a racist, would murder Lucy before allowing her to be captured by Native Americans (a trope repeated, albeit with genders inverted, in Assault), and when the rancher, Chris, reveals that his Native American wife, Yakima, has left with his rifle and horse. Chris laments his loss: “I never sell her. I love her so much. I beat her with the whip and she never get tired!”. Doc queries: “Your wife?”. Chris responds, “My horse! Find wife easy, yes, but not horse like that”.

Figure 9:

The representation of Apache warriors in Stagecoach, 1939.

We make these assertions not to suggest that either Assault or Stagecoach make politically liberal, unproblematic representations of race; clearly that is not the case. Rather, we argue that the mutually constructed political meaning in both films is complex, contested and ambiguous, open to multiple and contradictory meanings at the same time. And these films can occupy this liminal zone precisely because they are part of a larger system of historical and social narratives that seek to make shared meaning about what it means to live within and outside of communities. They can occupy this liminal zone because of intertextuality’s political liberation of meaning-making, which moves it away from auteurs and grants it instead to viewers of these texts, many of whom may identify in ways both various and contradictory. It acknowledges that these films are haunted spaces, and the specters of colonialism, slavery and racism interact with audience subjectivities, historical contexts and each other to create liminal and complex meanings.

This view aligns with statements made by Ford and Carpenter, who, despite being recognized as among America’s leading film auteurs, have both indicated that such a label is an uncomfortable fit. In the 1971 documentary Directed by John Ford (Peter Bogdanvich), Ford derailed an interviewer’s attempts to read meaning into his work by saying, “It’s no use talking to me about art. I make pictures to pay the rent”. For his part, Carpenter responded to attempts to read political meaning into his films by saying that “The audience should project into the film, into a character, into a situation, and react”.⁴⁰ Both directors, then, disavowed one of the core tenets of auteurism by relinquishing their right to make meaning and giving it back to the audience. Steve Smith has argued that Williams’ and Cumbow’s respective positions regarding the political meaning of Assault are “irreconcilable”. ⁴¹ These positions become reconcilable, however, when we acknowledge that audiences “project into” films from often complex and contradictory vantage points. They are also reconcilable when we recognize that historical and political systems are enmeshed within textual relationships; or, alternatively put, why should we expect films to convey neat resolutions to challenging social issues when those issues are not neatly resolved either within us as individuals or within our own communities? Stagecoach and Assault allow us to understand how key questions within American life are repeated across time and space but exist in perpetuity, in a state of incompleteness that offers hope of transformed power dynamics, and a better, more democratic, more inclusive future while, at the same time, acknowledging that these have not been realized.

We have examined community in these films using intertextuality, which is also about how meaning is made through communities of texts, communities that are often unstable, breaking free of the constraints imposed upon them, and that are subject to (re)interpretation across time and space, just like those in Assault and Stagecoach. We have referenced a community of texts in this work, though we acknowledge that “living on” encompasses more texts than we have space to examine here. We see that Assault lives on in parallel to a cycle of siege films that includes Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) and Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975). We note as well that Assault facilitates a living on of elements of blaxploitation, a film cycle “ending” as Assault was released. We perceive Assault living on in Carpenter’s later works, when Street Thunder transitions into Michael Myers terrifying urban neighbourhoods and Leigh becomes Laurie Strode (Halloween, 1978), when the defenders seek to protect each other and humanity from colonization by alien life forms (The Thing, 1982), and when, finally, the defenders have nothing left to defend in the post-apocalyptic nightmare of Escape from New York (1992). This speaks to the possibility of the intertext and of analyzing communities of films to continue to build upon this initial conversation, to encourage complex and nuanced understandings of how social and historical meanings are created and represented across time and space.

For Derrida, living on is simultaneously about living after and living beside, elsewhere or in parallel. These two aspects – the temporal and the spatial – converge at the junction between para- and inter-textuality. The one long continuous footnote that supplies the “Border Lines” to Derrida’s essay occupies the same (amount of) diegetic space as the latter and, in so doing, challenges the reader to question what and where the “text” is. In this way, the paratext, or what surrounds the text, infiltrates the text and the text bleeds forever out into the space beyond itself. And beyond the paratext – which encircles discrete texts and grants them autonomy but which also functions liminally, placing them beside textual others – lies the intertext, outside of which all texts lie (as themselves) but within which they must equally all reside (as part of a network of text). Roland Barthes famously wrote that he did not have to “summon up” Proust’s work because it was a part of him, “a circular memory”. For him, the intertext described “the impossibility of writing outside of the infinite text.”⁴² While silence has hitherto marked the relationship between Stagecoach and Assault, Carpenter does not need to acknowledge that Stagecoach is the great-grandfather of Assault because it is impossible for Assault to exist outside of Stagecoach; it is, as Proust is to Barthes, “the reference work”.⁴³ While we have demonstrated that Stagecoach and Assault live on through each other, these films come to life with each viewing, and thus it is the viewer who also enables living on. It is the viewer, politically and historically situated, who enables the sameness (or fixity) of the films to change (always and forever) with the place and time in which they are viewed. Living on, then, like these films, is about continuity and the hope of change.