This week I read the second half of Inventing Billy the Kid. Tatum talks about the Kid’s development from 1950 to 1980, and then concludes with some observations about the whole legend.
From 1955 to 1961, the Kid went from a vaguely sympathetic character to a full on tragic hero. He becomes a figure trapped by his time, “betrayed by himself and society; [and the] society. . .is betrayed by itself and the individual” (128). Tatum talks about The Left Handed Gun for a bit in this chapter, calling the Kid a “martyred Jesus-figure” and describing the film as a piece that scrapped the carefully cultivated idea of the self within society (131). Alienation played a new role in the Kid’s life, and many of the crimes he committed were paradoxically good and evil at the same time: they achieved worthy goals through repulsive means. One thing that wasn’t very clear in the chapter was why this shift happened. What need did Billy the Kid fill in this time period? Tatum suggests that after witnessing the horrible weaponry, economic depression, and the complete polarization of the Cold War, people adopted a pessimistic outlook, but this doesn’t fully explain it to me. Why would people popularize a bandit who was doomed by his own society?
In the 60s and 70s, the story of the Kid fleshes out the tragic genre by becoming enveloped in irony. Movies like Dirty Little Billy and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid had the Kid play an integral part in his own downfall. Tatum suggests a few reasons why this change happened. For one, people may have just wanted a better Billy the Kid story, and since most of the other angles had been covered, this was one of the few that remained historically viable (162). The story is still deeply unhappy though, perhaps appealing to the sense of sorrow and anger people felt seeing Vietnam and Watergate happening. The new generations that would be watching this might also see the irony as a way of coping with the messed up world they were living in.
Since this book was written in 1982, it obviously does not address modern interpretations of Billy the Kid. It might be good to ask the class what they think of the Kid and where they got those ideas from. We could then ask what needs these ideas filled, and, if people seem relatively apathetic about the whole thing, if it’s time to forget the whole myth.
The conclusion might is a good candidate for a reading, since it summarizes a lot of the book and makes several good points about the Kid’s malleability in the span of about 30 pages.