how to survive a car accident by Richard Chiem

Say “yes” when James invites you to L.A. with him for a weekend. Ask what kind of people are going to be there. Walk with your hands in your pockets and realize that you don’t know James very well. Feel a warm and mutual respect because you have read his poems in class before and liked the one about the boy who eats a mockingbird. Have conversations about life and death and joke about it. Ask how did that topic come up in the first place.

Meet Jenny in a vacant parking lot, still blue colored from morning light. Look at her in the eyes because she is important to you. Lay on the roof of the car waiting for James in front of his house. Listen to Wu-Tang Clan vibrate the metal of the roof you’re laying on. Imagine sitting inside a plane when one flies overhead. You could hear the drug-induced non-anxiety coating James’s voice when he wonders where his keys are.

Take the I - 5 North towards L.A. / San Bernardino. Sit shotgun and get assigned to be DJ. Listen to the calming clicks from your iPod. Take peppermint gum from Jenny. Acknowledge you have never done anything with these two friends before. Jenny appears glowing while driving. James in the backseat sinks into the cushion, closes his eyes.

Open and close windows. Talk about past relationships and laugh in unison during sexual parts. Get distracted with other passengers on the highway. Imagine relationships with those that make eye contact with you. Try, and remember Mary in a positive way and cut wind with your hand through your open window.

Play Rilo Kiley. Light a cigarette to share with everyone else in the car. Take unconscious drags of smoke.

Slowly pass a sixteen wheeler semi truck on your right hand side. Listen to Skinny Love. Notice a car up ahead swerving into your lane. Watch the car swerve back quickly to its own lane. Exhale when Jenny reacts and turns the steering wheel closer towards you. Hold the armrest while your own car swerves out of control. Notice how calm your breath is. Let things happen. Swerve into the semi on your right. Crash with the momentum of the cabin and everything behind you. Close your eyes. Duck somehow. The roof above you caves down and down again. The noise is tremendous. Glass shatters and rains in small bits and pieces and falls on top of your and your friends’ jeans.

Realize the car is stuck moving underneath the semi. Get dragged underneath while the semi is braking on the I - 5 North.

Lose your glasses. See blurry and near sighted. Leave the car through Jenny’s driver’s side door and keep walking away. Feel a strange urge to keep walking away. Resolve to baby steps. Jenny is ahead and James is behind you. Ask if everyone is okay with your mouth.

Hear your friends say your name a few times. Watch Jenny cover her own mouth. Experience your blood filming over your cheeks. They say you are the only one injured.

Lay on the hot pavement in front of the truck. Realize you are still chewing your gum, while cars are still passing by. When James starts asking you questions about Rilo Kiley, notice the softness in his voice and realize he is trying to keep you conscious. Chew the stale gum and answer all his questions. Talk about everything you know about Rilo Kiley. Cover your head with James’s white dress shirt. Hear Jenny crying and gasping while she is standing above you with her cell phone. Understand you have a gash. Say something weird, like you are still chewing your gum.

Love your life. Think about fighting.

Say you are conscious when a man appears. Say “thank you” when the man identifies he is a doctor, someone who had pulled over, dressed in civilian clothes. Say your name is “Richard” and call him “Brian.” Say you are conscious when there are paramedics. Say you feel no pain in your legs when they ask. Look up at moving clouds when they massage you into a neck brace. Say you are conscious. This is the first time you have been inside an ambulance, so remember everything. Love your life. Feel convinced you have no regrets. Feel the ambulance drive away and the road beneath your back.

Ask how everyone else is doing. Notice how all the paramedics look at you in this way while they apply tubes and pat you down. They all say good. Listen to them discuss how you might be in shock.

Wonder if there is an imaginary clock somewhere inside you ticking. Stare at the ceiling and listen to sirens. Imagine traffic around you opening up and clearing a path. Move your fingers, move your toes inside your shoes.

Arrive safely to the hospital. Know without knowing you are going to be okay. Watch the ceilings change as they guide you down hallways, double doors and elevators. Ask more people how their days are. See smiles and feel touched you have the power to surprise them. Hear more talks that you are in shock. Enter the emergency room become tired under the lights and feel less conscious. Everyone wants you to stay with them. Listen to a disembodied voice, from a doctor walking around with an IV tower, describe your body parts. Your head is a gash. Your stomach is soft and supple. Realize your clothes are being cut with scissors and stay still. Say your name is Richard. Ask where you are. Ask anything you want to say, say anything you want to say.

Receive visits from nurses and doctors. Slowly feel aches and strange pains in broad places in your body. Learn Nurse Renee has been tending to you even when you were unconscious. Feel empty without reason when Nurse Renee tells you everything is going to be okay. Feel alive when she stays there with you for hours on a fold up chair. Your family has been notified. On your head, there are nine staples and dried blood.

Experience bliss in isolating sounds and thoughts and moving your lips slightly. Say you feel good. Ask where your friends are.

Leave the emergency room like nothing happened. Feel the sensation of being filmed when hugging James and Jenny and your aunt who arrives from Newport Beach, who all have been waiting for you in the waiting room. Look everyone in the eyes. Notice there are no magazines. Say you are ready to go.

Suddenly turn around and watch Nurse Renee run through some double doors to hand you a slip of paper. She says, “You’ll be needing this.”

Read a prescription for Vicodin with her name and signature. Watch her shake your hand and wait a moment before she leaves. Eat dinner at a Pho restaurant with your friends and aunt in your hospital gown. Devour hot food and noodles. Talk all night and teach Jenny and James how to say “We almost died” in American Sign Language.

Meet Mary in a parking lot, some place random in Santa Monica, and cringe when you notice her new boyfriend. Feel like you should have died when Mary makes a few jokes about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and caresses her new boyfriend near his thighs. Listen to The Mountain Goats and remember you authored this mixtape for Mary and watch the highway for hours. Enjoy affinity and human connection watching James sign “We almost died” with his hands in the backseat with you. Listen to Mary joke more.

He says, “We should have called someone else to pick us up from L.A.”

Say everything is okay. Find bits of glass everywhere for days.

Get invited to a Halloween party. Go to the Halloween party and shake hands with people you know and people you don’t know. Say thank you when someone compliments you on your costume, on how how lifelike the wound appears. Say hello. Lip sync some songs you like from the party. Sing the chorus. Rap “Living life without fear. Twenty five carrots in my baby girl’s ear.” Rap “Birthdays were the worst days. Now we sip champagne when we’re thirsty.” Say nothing when everyone repeats “party and bullshit,” while leaning against a wall.

Laugh only when something is funny. When something is funny, remember to look someone in the eye because you liked what they just said. You want them to know.

Wagon Master (1950) by John Ford

“I made twelve or fourteen pictures for him [John Ford], and the happiest I’ve ever seen him on a film was Wagon Master.” -Harry Carey Jr. interviewed by Lindsay Anderson

John Ford’s Wagon Master is quintessential Ford yet often feels sidelined in the broader discussion of his oeuvre. It is not a film mounted in structure but closer to a tone poem; campfire tall tales and legends set to song. Why this film lived in relative anonymity for years was partially due to it being released the same year as Rio Grande, that along with Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon were part of the ‘Cavalry Trilogy’. It also had a limited release by RKO that ultimately cemented the film’s fate as a money loser. Yet, part of the film’s enduring appeal and since rehabilitated legacy among Ford admirers like filmmakers Lindsay Anderson and Peter Bogdanovich is that it is so unpretentious and unostentatious in contrast from the other films of the genre, including Ford’s own work. The great critic Dennis Lim would call Wagon Master, “The last gasp of the classical western,” and “... the pinnacle of the genre’s optimistic ideals.” There is something appealing about Wagon Master, even if not consciously intended, as a film that goes against the currents of the genre’s shifting focuses and conventions.

Wagon Master is ultimately a film about community and forging bonds for survival. It is about a rag-tag group of earnest, God-fearing Mormons, medicine show hucksters, and horse traders trying to make it to the San Juan River portion of Utah who run into trouble with a ‘family’ of robbers known as the Cleggs. It echoes Stagecoach in its strange bedfellows collective, but Wagon Master contains no pull-in close up of a cowboy that made John Wayne into an American icon as it happened in Stagecoach. The film, nonetheless, has many of Ford regulars such as Harry Carey Jr, Ben Johnson, Joanne Dru, Jane Darwell, and Ward Bond (Dru, Carey, and Johnson acted together the year before in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon). There was also the notable performance of Charles Kemper, who played the film’s central villain, ‘Uncle’ Shiloh Clegg, who passed from injuries sustained in a 1950 car accident a month after the film was released. Kemper’s filmography is laced with work for European expats in Hollywood such as Jacques Tourneur, Jean Renoir, and Fritz Lang, but Wagon Master should have been his breakout. His folksy, cherubic gruffness of a man who is, nonetheless, a brute is quite reminiscent of Burl Ives and Charles Laughton. Had he not passed, and Kemper was able to build from this villainous turn, perhaps the legacy of Wagon Master would have been a more pressing topic within American film culture.

Wagon Master does not so much subvert the individual Western hero as the approximation of the Western film, which Ford is largely credited with mythologizing and popularizing. Ford was open about the economic realities and tight budget he was given to make this film which essentially allowed him to lean into the bare essentials and essence of the West. Ultimately, in the end, Wagon Master was a John Ford film to its very core. It has everything you want and expect from a Ford film minus the variation of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, or Henry Fonda in a cowboy hat. What the film lacks in classic Hollywood star power ultimately allows the film to become the ensemble piece that it much better served as in terms of presenting a mosaic of Western life. Even real-life American hero, Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, has a notable role as a Navajo chief (though Thorpe in real-life was born into Sac & Fox Nation) who speaks to Ben Johnson in the language. That exchange is especially noteworthy in presenting how non-discordant the relations are between the Mormons and Navajo people in the film, especially when weighing Ford’s complicated reputation and legacy on the topic.

Despite the lack of instant visual iconography viewers can immediately see in The Searchers, Stagecoach, or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (another RKO picture for Ford made a year before in bewitching technicolor versus Wagon Master’s black-and-white), the majesty of the Utah-set landscapes and silhouettes of wagons and horseback. The film is about myth and how this film’s scenario encompasses the story of America itself. Where it lacks in dynamic dialogue the film’s music underscores the film’s optimism and mood. The then-popular country and western group, The Sons of the Pioneers, begin the film singing the spirited “Wagons West”, and ultimately as the film’s Greek chorus for the rest of the film with other songs. Music is also elemental for communities struck within the film, with Mormon hymns, fiddle playing at bonfire dances, and Navajo Pow-Wows becoming as crucial as scenes of the gunfights and travels.

It then becomes of little surprise that there is something not static, but rather, continuous about Wagon Master in the fact there is no real official ending of the film. Instead, Ford closes on a montage of our characters still traveling along, even a moment of Ward Bond and Harry Carey sharing a tune, as The Sons of Pioneers sing the finale. The film is a love letter to the West but also the bonds struck among the people who braved those travels along the way.

-Caden Mark Gardner

Caden Mark Gardner is a freelance film critic from Upstate New York. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: An Examination of Trans Film Images in Cinema.

But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century available now