#finalscene

The Failure of Television’s Interpretation of a Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel’s Successful Finale. (Cole Wimpee)

“A Vision, you say?.......Yup. Hell of a Vision.” 

Captain Woodrow F. Call’s delivery of the iconic end line of dialogue in the 1988 miniseries was not the final line of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Western novel, Lonesome Dove. 

The conclusive remark was by the journalist - the partner character in the scene with Call - who answers Call’s question about what occurred in the fire of the old saloon established in the novel’s exposition:

“They say he missed her. They say he loved that whore.’’ 

For a late 1980′s primetime television special, and in an era of the monopoly networks, I understand why the ‘Production Gods’ cut the line, or insisted that screenwriters, producers, director, actor, and / or editing room people do so - the derogatory term for women that it is - and yet, something about it has always bothered me since reading the novel upon which it was based around 2010. Many of my friends know that the ‘Lonesome Dove’ Miniseries is like a cinematic bible for me.

 “UVA UVAM VIVENDO VARIA FIT’ is Gus McRae’s final tombstone writ, sloppy Latin with two schools of thought on its translation: 

Meaning either, 1. “The changing vine becomes the living vine”, or 2. “One Grape Causes Another Grape to Ripen.”

Both beautiful concepts, and even more beautiful is the irony of the sloppy ambiguity to its meaning placed as the only unbroken remnant of Gus’ sense of humor upon the vain charmer’s romantic riverbed grave. Its a tough world, and life leaves little to scrap by with in the end, the messaging tells us. But it winks at us as destroys us.

The miniseries, though sentimentally aged with its swooning epic score and faded cinematography, is most apt viewing for its acting portrayals (particularly in the dual talents of Robert DuVall as Augustus McRae and Tommy Lee Jones as Woodrow F. Call, both aging Texas Rangers on one last adventure. The series could hardly be more spot-on in casting).

However, the novel by McMurtry, even more than the miniseries, is undoubtedly, the true masterpiece, and the finale line of the book goes the furthest in its ultimate insinuation of what might be termed, the ‘Lonesome Dove Argument’. 

Since its premiere 30 years ago, fans have speculated who the ‘Lonesome Dove’ was supposed to signify - as a character metaphor. Though there’s been argument for characters as left-field as Blue Duck, the villianous native played by Frederick Forrest, as well as July Johnston’s sidekick, Roscoe, the prime candidates have been Call’s bastardized, and so orphaned son, Newt, played by Ricky Schroeder,  July Johnston himself as played by Chris Cooper, or the young beauty of the novel, known simply as Lori played by Diane Lane. Newt’s mother, a character we never have seen due to her passing away, and whom Call left behind so many years earlier also has strong prominent support, even as a character ‘in absentia’). 

When Captain Call announces, “Hell of a Vision.”, in the miniseries final gesture, he confirms - through a Hollywood-esque montage of memory that wraps up the series all so nicely, the epic saga of pain, friendship, death, birth, and life along the Western frontier through flashback footage of the entire series. Its a delicious moment, one I guiltily adore. But its terribly flawed by how it leaves us with a mistaken message to the novel’s reverberate point. Call’s choking back the tears, and chest rising confirmation of his own “Hell” and, Hell it was, “...of a vision.” does more to triumph the old Ranger’s mission which is the main action of the play (a cattle drive from South Texas to Montana). The line also lifts up the paradigm of the proverbial ‘patriarchal man of vision’; a man we see in the moistened face of Tommy Lee Jones - providing us the warm and fuzzy insight to stubbornness and flawed austerity made both vulnerable, and then, in this final teary-eyed scene, proud of his accomplishments somehow - or determined to doggedly be that lone man, dismissing love, like Gus’s laughter, as superfluous. Capt. Woodrow F. Call  strides into the sunset. But, we’ve missed a crucial aspect of the novel’s storytelling. Any author will tell you the end is easily one, if not, the most important event of a story. Though I’ve loved the scene (and the movie) for years, here’s the crux, or ‘the hell of a problem’ that the miniseries embraced... 

The story’s final point is that loneliness is a feature of the world, and, because of loss, is all brought back to having root in man’s inability to love more deeply.

It is not Captain Call’s valorized vision making tremendously painful sacrifices for success that is the final statement of ‘Lonesome Dove’. Call’s failure to love, rather, is the end rumination.. Despite his success in life, Call failed in the way most important: He abandoned the dove (Newt’s mom, and thus Newt, his only and unrecognized son, himself). 

Call sees in the burned down saloon the passion for true love that he never had the courage himself to experience: here, his eyes find the charred consequence of love truly engaged. The love of a man so lonely, yet so devoted to its object, that, like the object of his own desire (Lori, too, of course is a ‘Lonesome Dove’ who cannot have the departed one-legged, Gus ever again), burns himself alive in an act of passionate loss, is Call’s facing his own tragic flaw. 

Call sees what he did years before the novel ever back- in this moment of assessing the Saloon’s charred remains - an act of cruel disregard to Newt’s mother, and to the dismissed progeny of his desire, the infant Newt. Call’s final recognition, then, according to McMurtry, is that he is a ‘hell of a failure’. Call, like us the audience, can see the character’s inability to love appropriately in both metaphorical, and starkly literal, symbols. 

Lonesome Dove, then is not, in final regard, a success story of two heroic old Texas Rangers on one last Wild West Voyage to experience the ups and downs of the frontier life before its 20th Century Civilization. That would be over-romanticizing even McMurtry’s message. Lonesome Dove is finally a story of failure. It says to us as it ends its fictional universe, that love is all that really matters, and that the loneliness that exists in our own world, is not only caused, by exponentially compounded by cowards like the otherwise virtuous man, created on the page as Woodrow F. Call. It is a warning that the miniseries itself cowardly missed and abandoned. It is the tragic point of the character and the novel. 

Lonesome Dove’s conclusion is a ‘vision of hell’ - where the runt of early comic relief (embodied by a saloon bartender and piano player), and a fool so desperately infatuated with a woman who has deserted him for the trail drive - reveals, to us all, that more courage of real love is shown by the romantic in a fiery suicide, than Captain Call, or men like him who are so fascist-like committed to protecting their own emotions, will ever know or reflect on.