Jia Lin’s Weblog

“Down in the valley” is the strangest American movie I’ve watched in recent years. First, it’s hard to place the movie in certain category the whole time you are watching it. It starts like a love story between a lonely teenage girl and a sunny mid-aged cowboy and together they pursuing trueness of life. In middle of the movie, the cowboy shot the girl in rage, and abducted her little brother to San Fernando Valley, and led a couple of days of ranch life he dreamed of having with the girl. Then you realize what the girl thought she wanted was not really what she needed, and the cowboy was not what he claimed, or what he thought, he was. Then you think maybe the movie is more about the struggle of a pure being of natural human against the industrialization. The cowboy appeared to have all the qualities of a dreamer-an outsider of civilized society and machine culture, lover of nature and horse, and believer in love and heart. On the other hand, to be a poor dreamer in a commercial society, he had to find his way of survival, such as stealing or intruding others’ property. He has his perfect excuse to himself about shooting the girl (he thought the girl was not quite herself when she said she would not run away with him), but he lied to the little boy to protect his loving image and alienate him from his father. Then we realize he is not a cowboy from South Dakota, but a Jew growing up in the valley. We don’t know if he’s schizophrenic or if he is a con artist. We don’t know how he came up with the cowboy personality and mindset (maybe western movies), but there is certain no space in the valley for cowboy way of life.The girl’s fostering father, a police officer who loves guns and lacks communication skills with his children, represents everything that the cowboy is not. A symbol guardian of social order and morality, he thought he knew how to discipline and protect his children, though he’s often at lost at the burst of the daughter’s wild spirit. Under the legitimacy the state granted him on the two children, his action and rationale are accepted and protected, even they don’t come with affection and understanding, as the cowboy provided. At the end, the father shot the cowboy to death and the two kids, in tears, spread the cowboy’s ashes to the part of valley that has not been developed in the city expansion. You come to realize, maybe the movie is about the struggle of the two social forces that fight for the future of human beings: humanity vs. law and order, nature vs. machine, sensibility vs. sense.