Legends of the Fall

Guest author First World Refugee gives a review of this cautionary tale.

I recently re-watched one of my favorite films, Edward Zwick’s Legends of the Fall (1994). It’s an epic story about a family in early 20th-century Montana, packed with awe-inspiring scenery, war, romance, suffering, and redemption. What I did not catch on previous viewings is that it’s also a subtle cautionary tale on the dangers of sending your kids to college.

The film opens on an idyllic ranch in the Montana Territory, where Colonel William Ludlow has settled after becoming disillusioned with his government’s policy toward the Indians.

Ludlow does well for himself, and his three sons Alfred, Tristan, and Samuel grow into strapping, intelligent, and adventurous young men. Indeed, the Ludlow family ranch is a utopia at the outset of the movie.

Then, a train arrives from the Northeast carrying the youngest of the three Ludlow boys. Samuel, an earnest young scholar on vacation after a successful semester at Harvard University, has arrived with a new lady friend, Susannah Fincannon. Samuel’s older brothers and father are immediately mesmerized by her beauty and charm.

There’s just one problem: beneath her elegant feminine mystique, Susannah is basically a blue-haired social justice warrior.

Now you may be thinking: That doesn’t make any sense. SJWs are a modern phenomenon that just became prevalent in the 2010s.

And that’s where you would be dead wrong. In fact, Susannah was worse than a modern SJW because she was a pretty, normal-looking woman rather than some hambeast with bright-colored hair sporting a “black trans lives matter” t-shirt; harder to suss out, and thus much more cunning and deadly.

Alfred sniffs out that they’ve got a bleeding-heart lib in their midst right off the bat, gently teasing Susannah about it in their very first interaction:

Alfred: Miss Fincannon, Mother has told us of your sympathy for the “social reformers.”

Susannah: You make it sound like a disease.

Alfred: No, no, no, on the contrary, I’m in agreement.

Right then and there, Colonel Ludlow should have driven Ms. Fincannon right back to the train station and bought her a one-way return ticket to Boston, and withdrawn Samuel from Harvard. If only.

But instead, blinded by her beauty, Alfred goes full male-feminist simp-mode and signals his sympathy with the “social reformers,” a.k.a. progressives/SJWs, thus sealing his family’s fate.

Progressivism started in the late 19th/early 20th century in tandem with the “Social Gospel” movement, which was the belief that scientific thinking and expertise should be applied to social ills in order to bring about a utopia on earth to make ready for the second coming of Christ. This is where you get the rise of a cult of technocratic experts pushing things like eugenics, managed capitalism, regulatory bureaucracy, women’s suffrage, and prohibition, among other things.

One of the most infamous progressives was President Woodrow Wilson, who, in addition to campaigning with the slogan “He kept us out of war” — never mind that he subsequently got us into war — literally thought he was the messiah. This is fitting because progressives, including the fictional Ms. Fincannon, have always seen themselves as moral crusaders “on the right side of history,” courageously leading the forces of light and progress to remake a benighted and backward world in their own image. To this day, American society and politics are still shot through with all the self-righteousness of the Social Gospel movement; the specifics of the theology have just been updated a bit.

In fact, I just had this fresh new take occur to me yesterday that basically, Wokeness is just a new relig— just kidding, no reheated 2018 takes here!

Anyway.

It’s evident from the second he arrives that Samuel has been infected with the progressive brain worm. Unfortunately, the infection is terminal, with Samuel convinced of the need for intervention in the Great War going on in Europe. Samuel has no doubt already tweeted “#IStandWithFrance,” started a GoFundMe page to raise money for Chauchat M1915 light machine guns for French forces, and put a “BLM” (Belgian Lives Matter) filter over his Facebook profile picture.

Samuel’s incessant chatter about needing to do something to halt the Kaiser’s wanton aggression and help “make the world safe for democracy” culminates in informing his father at the dinner table that he’s going to Canada to enlist so that he can fight. Alfred, totally smitten with Susannah and afflicted with the same brain parasite, is set on going along for the ride. Tristan, the middle, renegade brother who couldn’t give two Zelenskys about a war that has nothing to do with him, then insists on joining in order to look out for his younger brother. Ludlow, a jaded military man, is upset with his boys, and stoically bids them farewell.

Not to rehash the entire movie here, but during the war Alfred is badly injured, Samuel is killed by machine gun fire amidst a gas attack, and Tristan subsequently goes berserk scalping Germans, leading to his immediate discharge from the Canadian Army.

Samuel’s death is the domino that sends the Ludlow family into turmoil, and essentially everyone ends up dying a violent or lonely death, with the family ranch falling into disrepair along the way.

Ms. Fincannon, for her part, having destroyed the Ludlow family after being romantically involved with all three of the brothers at some point, commits suicide toward the end of the movie.

It’s a tale as old as time, really. Real salt-of-the-earth Americans, just minding their own business, enjoying life in a country blessed with geographic immunity to most of the world’s conflicts, are then whipped up into a war-fever by chickenhawk elites eager for peons to fight their latest cockamamie, far-flung moral crusade for them. At least now, if your son brings a rabid lib home from college, you’ll probably be able to spot her/them/xem right away. If only the Ludlow clan had been so fortunate.