PicoBlog

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

—John 15:13

So many acquaintances; so few friends.

Has such a sentence ever rung more true than in our era? For years now, a good number of us have had several hundred “friends” on social media. Being lightly acquainted is no evil thing, of course, but in the same era when friendship is seemingly ubiquitous, it is strangely hard to find true friends. Someone will protest, though: I have lots of friends! I keep in touch with many people! That’s not untrue for many of us. But let me sharpen the point this way: when you are defamed and attacked for some reason, how many people defend you? Who risks their social standing on your behalf? Who walks to your side when the guns come out?

The risks of helping a friend under duress are grave indeed today. You’re likely to get cancelled for taking the wrong stand. What does this encourage, then? It encourages quiet friendship, behind-the-scenes friendship, lower-risk and lower-yield friendship. It breeds genuinely well-meaning associations (which have real blessing in them), but out of sight. Being an acquaintance is low-risk; but being a friend, a true friend, is a very risky proposition indeed when the Internet never forgets.

I thought about these themes recently after re-watching the Western epic Tombstone. Late in the film, Doc Holliday discusses his illness-defying support of Wyatt Earp with a character named Turkey Creek Jack Johnson:

Johnson: Why you doin' this, Doc?

Doc Holliday: Because Wyatt Earp is my friend.

Johnson: Friend? ... I got lots of friends.

Doc Holliday: I don't.

This is, I sense, the message of the film. Well, it’s one of the messages; one other driving argument of Tombstone is the need to be free and not be tied down to the wrong person. This second overarching motif is tired, goofy, and makes for hard viewing in the scenes when Wyatt Earp moons over an actress femme fatale. It’s classic early postmodern follow-your-heart drivel, and if it had a bigger role in Tombstone, it would capsize the whole picture.

But it doesn’t. Thankfully, it is a largely lifeless and perfunctory narratival thread. Like a cut-off powerline suddenly infused with thousands of volts of current, Tombstone commands your attention not in its yawn-inducing swoony moments, but in the many sequences when Holliday (Val Kilmer) and Earp (Kurt Russell) enter the frame on the other side of some roughnecks. (The supporting cast is amazingly good, with Stephen Lang and Michael Biehn standing out, and no one hitting a false note.)

For Doc’s part, seemingly every time we encounter him, he enters the frame sidelong. He enters his scenes languidly, panther-like, and continually shows up for the fight alongside Earp. Though he is a dissolute, wild-living man, Holliday actually operates by a precisely-calibrated moral clock. He likes his vices, and they are in fact killing him quickly. But though it might seem otherwise, he is not driven by vice, but by friendship.

But not Facebook friendship. Holliday’s conception of friendship boils down to this: you either walk with a man into the teeth of death, or you are not his friend. Turkey Jack Johnson has many friends, but seemingly few he would die for. Holliday has few friends, but the ones he has are men worthy of his very life itself. So we spy the distinction referenced above between acquaintances and friends.

Doc is indeed a good friend to have. In Tombstone, he seems to be a kind of genial reaper. Unusually, long before the days of the bland John Wick’s computerized hyper-violence, he is the reaper we cheer for—but he is a reaper nonetheless. He is the deadliest gunfighter in Earp’s crew and everyone knows it: Earp knows it, Doc knows it, the Cowboys know it. Early in the film, Doc puts his capacity for violence to use for personal gain. As the movie goes on, a subtle shift occurs, and Doc employs his death-dealing in the service of Earp’s cause, a cause which happens to clean out a whole festering horde of lawless men.

This is a key element of Tombstone: good men do not get to enjoy themselves in this life for long. It’s a pleasing fiction, the idea of a frictionless life. If you are attuned at all to morality and the defense of the innocent, you will not need to wait long for the call to action. The central conceit of Tombstone is that Earp wishes to leave his lawman ways behind; he just wants to make money and have fun with his brothers. But his town is being terrorized; his brother is murdered; and the Cowboys will not go away. Though Earp tries to ride off, he is summoned back.

More accurately, he wakes up. Earp in vengeance mode is a smoldering force to behold, striking and leading with ferocity. Doc, by contrast, is smooth and self-possessed. Yet Doc as noted is inescapably deadly. In the film’s climax, he hunts down his prey, Johnny Ringo, and it is like watching a spider pull apart a fly, except vastly more satisfying. Tombstone understands—as few modern films do—vengeance. Vengeance is not inherently bad in a theistic universe (and the Christian worldview). Vengeance is the wages of sin. Vengeance is what spilt blood summons.

So the reaper cometh. Just as Earp shows tremendous courage in a blazing gunfight, striding out to kill Curly Bill, the head of the Cowboys, so Doc strolls into a forest clearing to deliver vengeance to Ringo. He is acting, we note, in friendship. He has taken Earp’s place in the duel. This is no costless gunplay opportunity for Doc; this is his last self-determined act. He will die for doing this. His last coiled burst of strength and cunning and skill is used to stand in for his friend Wyatt. In this way he lays down his life for his friend.

Kilmer’s performance is startling and sui generis. There is no corollary for it, and it stands out not only in the canon of Westerns, but in film more generally. It has serious shadings of Lee Van Cleef’s magnificent viper-like portrait of “Angel Eyes” in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. But unlike Clint Eastwood’s terrifying nemesis, Doc is not the bad guy; he is the (morally complicated) good guy. Kilmer not so much steals the movie as twists it around his finger; his strange and elegantly composed speech (from a marvelously original script by Kevin Jarre), still but powerful neck, unswerving eye-contact, and graceful movement mark him as a living spectacle.

Add to this the fact that both Earp and Doc—and the Earp brothers, including a brilliant Sam Elliott as Virgil Earp—are suited in waistcoats and flowing duster jackets and you have a setup that drips with manhood that is at once refined and wild. It is irresistible, and this was truly the performance of Kilmer’s life, one nearly unmatched in film. (Russell’s work is nearly at the same level, particularly in his martial scenes, which ripple with intensity; Russell’s narrowed eyes alone are enough to make you involuntarily back away from the violence you were just about to unleash.)

Tombstone does not suggest that Doc would have survived had he failed to show up in Wyatt’s place. He is dying from tuberculosis when we meet him. (In that scene, the camera has him slowly look up to meet its gaze, just as in the climactic battle with Ringo, a mesmerizing effect that signals right off the bat that Kilmer has the film by the throat). Ironically, this makes him a man who does not fear death, shown by the fact that Doc teases his fight-partners by calling them “daisy” to draw their fire.

Yet as noted, though Doc seems wild and reckless, he is in fact the most watchful of Earp’s band. Before the film’s close, in a foreshadowing of the bloody end, Ringo is baying for blood. Whipping out of his chair from the background, Doc appears, uncharacteristically roaring “Say WHEN!” to Ringo. The reaper is ready, it seems, more ready than his foes know. (Then, quick as he came, he’s back in the barber’s chair, getting his mustache trimmed, it seems.)

But Tombstone is not ultimately a film about death. It is a film about life—about friendship in particular. You are truly living, Tombstone suggests, when you are a friend. And there are not many friends out there. The way to know if you have a friend, ultimately, is to see if he shows up when your hour of reckoning approaches. Conversely, the way to know if you are a friend to someone else, Tombstone seems to say, is to meet him in that fateful moment, and stand there, shoulder to shoulder, the world on fire behind you, a leering gunman before you, and call to your foe in a voice of iron: “Say when.”

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