The Bonanza Citadel: Ghosts of the Comstock in The Godmonster of Indian Flats

Art & Trash, episode 40
The Bonanza Citadel: Ghosts of the Comstock in The Godmonster of Indian Flats
Stephen Broomer, September 6, 2024

The West was always weird. The Godmonster of Indian Flats weaves two narratives that gradually collide: one is the story of the Godmonster, a grotesque mutated sheep that escapes a scientist’s laboratory and terrorizes the town. The other is the story of Virginia City, Nevada, the palace intrigue of the town, whose citizens live somewhere between a tourist’s ideal of the Wild West, a townscape of ruined brick and rotting wood buildings, and a technologized present of video surveillance. It is a genre movie, and yet it is an imaginative variation on the genre movie that has so much to say about America that it extends far beyond the metaphor of the monster. The ecological terror of the Godmonster creature is absorbed into a broader constellation, of gothic paranoia, industrial espionage, and the aging nostalgia of an entrenched American idyll.

SCRIPT:

Through the course of the nineteenth century, the Westward Expansion captured the American imagination. From the days of the Gold Rush to the closing of the frontier, the settler-pioneer-cowboy became the essential American image, a rugged man in chaps and a wide-brimmed Stetson hat. He rode a horse, lasso and rifle on hand, navigating a hazardous, contested territory of masked gunslingers and Indian braves. The West was always weird. In the wake of Indigenous cultures being assimilated or annihilated, the ghosts of the west came to settle on the canvas-and-denim conscience of that settler fantasy. Mountains could be gods and there were ancestors on the wind, on the vast open plain under starry skies above. As the Cowboy remained the common youth fantasy of the twentieth century, other images emerged and merged into its mythos: by the mid-twentieth-century, it wasn’t surprising for movie cowboys to contend with the supernatural, as when Billy the Kid fought Count Dracula, or when Jesse James met Frankenstein’s Daughter. In the mystery of a vast and wild western landscape, the Cowboy could find phantom empires, starships, and monsters. When the West was won, and there was no more mystery. A new awareness of the land gave way to speculative stories of what the pioneers might have found out there in the dark. The West was always weird. The Western genre was about an intrusion on the wilderness by civilization: any conflict that resulted would pit worlds against one another. Worlds divided by language and custom and faith could just as readily be reimagined as worlds divided by cosmic distances or by the veil of death. At the same time what was often celebrated in stories of the Wild West was something primed for rejection by a wizening mid-twentieth-century progressive sensibility. American culture matured rapidly through the causes of Civil Rights, Environmentalism and the American Indian Movement. By the 1970s, the dreary Old West was beginning to face a reckoning, rechristened the Weird West in comic books, novels and films, subject to allegorical revisioning. The triumphs of the frontier could seen plainly, as they were, compromised, hypocritical, sinful, the evil of “a land vaguely realizing westward."

Fredric Hobbs was a sculptor and painter who, though he was originally from the east coast, became preoccupied with the cause of Virginia City, Nevada. Virginia City had been the heart of the Comstock Lode in the 1860s and 1870s, a city that was once, briefly, by the glint of silver, the richest place on earth. Through the twentieth century, it became a tourism hub for those interested in the history of the Gold Rush. The West was always weird, but it was never weirder than Virginia City a century on from the Comstock lode, a frontier town shaped into a tourist trap that, like so many in late modern America, promised a tender revision of the grit of the hard nineteenth-century living. Hobbs’s interest in Virginia City and its conservation of settler-pioneer America was easily reconciled with his interests in ecology, evident in his drivable sculptures and his work in what he called ‘art eco’. He was fascinated by the forces that drive technological change, and followed that interest by conceiving of an art that reconciled interactivity with ecological consciousness. At the same time that he was conceptualizing ‘art eco’, he was making films, and his aesthetic sensibilities carried over into the psycho-cosmic, psychotronic fantasies of films like Roseland and Alabama’s Ghost, unclassifiable, outlandish, surreal comedies propelled by Hobbs’s sense of Western peculiarity. His stories could sit easily beside the weird, episodic, bohemian Americana of Thomas Pynchon’s V. The Godmonster of Indian Flats, Hobbs’s fourth feature film, would again pursue highly imaginative and original themes, but this time in the context of the Old West and its debts: the film is a collision of genres, a monster movie that uses the legacy of the West, the Gold Rush, and the strange station of the tourist attraction, as a backdrop to a political and ecological fable. It is a work of Weird West fantasy, but more than its contemporaries in the science-fiction and horror genres, it is rooted in a reality of ecological mutation and sentimental notions of America’s past.

From the film’s outset, sheep represent a pastoral splendour, a peace to be disrupted. Images of penned-in sheep are accompanied by the sounds of Johanne Sebastian Bach’s secular Hunting Cantata, specifically, the aria, ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’: “where rulers are ruling well, we may feel peace and rest and what makes countries happy.” This pastoral scene is contrasted with the disruptive speed of modern life, represented by the colourful, corrupt and frighteningly mechanical world of Reno, Nevada. The route from Reno to Virginia City showcases the beauty of rural Nevada, its scenic highways and vast prairie. On the soundtrack, the driver defends the nostalgic lifestyle of Virginia City’s residents, declaring that “living in the past ain’t so bad when you think about it.” On the contrary, Virginia City’s performance of the past isn’t so different from the superficial simulation of the Wild West in Michael Crichton’s Westworld, released that same year. It is a village of anachronisms, with a bar band that plays old-timey banjo music but who look like hipster-beatniks, a city-wide communications system straight out of 1984, and headlines announcing the Apollo 11 mission pinned above the barroom door. Virginia City is not a bucolic fantasy: here, superstition and cynicism coexist much as past and present converge, and those who maintain the tourism industry have also inherited their selfish appetites from the silver miners of 1859. Those in the city who are dedicated to maintaining this facade of historical conservation are the worst kind of landlords, in it for the sake of their own mastery of this domain, for their own financial gain, for their own phantom empire, a frozen one, congealing in the nostalgia of those too young to have lived it. The symbolic narrative that plays out in this setting is not one of past and future coming into conflict, but of a competition for ecological, technological and geological futures, pitched between reactionary nostalgia and everyday evolution.

The Godmonster of Indian Flats weaves two narratives that gradually collide: one is the story of the Godmonster, a grotesque mutated sheep that escapes a scientist’s laboratory and terrorizes the town. The other is the story of Virginia City, the palace intrigue of the town, whose citizens live somewhere between a tourist’s ideal of the Wild West, a townscape of ruined brick and rotting wood buildings, and a technologized present of video surveillance. It is a genre movie, and yet it is an imaginative variation on the genre movie that has so much to say about America that it extends far beyond the metaphor of the monster. The ecological terror of the Godmonster creature is absorbed into a broader constellation, of gothic paranoia, industrial espionage, and the aging nostalgia of an entrenched American idyll. Godmonster follows the tropes of the monster movie: Eddie Echevarria, a sheep rancher whose rustic background is announced by his sheepskin vest, is fleeced and beaten by Virginia City’s bar patrons. After being rescued by a local anthropologist, Professor Clemens, Eddie has a nocturnal encounter with an alien force, in a montage of swinging bones, flashing lights, and stampeding sheep. In this encounter, Eddie witnesses the birth of a mutated sheep embryo, which the professor, his assistant Mariposa, and the rancher transport to a lab in Indian Flats, where they nurture it in an incubator. Meanwhile, the town is a stage for industrial conflict, with east-coast executive Christopher Barnstable undergoing a strange hazing when he attempts to purchase the Comstock mining rights from the townspeople, with town leader Silverdale manipulating the situation for his own gain. In this world, all but the Godmonster represent greed and control. No one’s motives are pure, save for young lovers Eddie and Mariposa, who recede into the background of this crowded fantasy.

In Virginia City, Silverdale and his secret society of civic leaders pursue a conservation program, revitalizing the town while preserving it as a historical attraction. They stave off an encroaching modern industrial America that would change the ruling order of the town. Barnstable represents elite, billionaire mining interests. The villains of the town—Silverdale, his assistant Maldove, the local madame and fortune-teller Alta—are defending the historical fantasy of a still-growing America; they are suspended in a moment when there remained virgin territory and mystery. What remains now is only mastery—technological mastery, scientific mastery, and through it all a damning out of magic. Silverdale and company pursue their ends in unjust ways, and what they represent is a throwback to a brutish age, yet they are also righteous opponents of industrial interests that would undervalue their assets and force them to sell and assimilate. The irony of such a forced assimilation isn’t lost on Hobbs.

Themes of race and racial division were present in Hobbs’s earlier films, through characters played by Christopher Brooks, whose blackness served as incitement and catalyst and bridged universal themes of magic and domination with explicitly contemporary revolutions. Brooks appears as Barnstable, an elite east-coast interloper who serves as an agent of commerce and greed, and his performance leans into his difference from the white residents of Virginia City. Like Virgil Tibbs, Barnstable is an educated Black man whose blackness seems a subtle provocation for small-town heels like Sheriff Gordon and village heavy Maldove, from the sheriff engineering a near-lynching of Barnstable, to Maldove taking umbrage to Barnstable’s fraternizing in the brothel, to Barnstable himself improvising a blues dirge while imprisoned in the town jail. The Godmonster of Indian Flats is not a film with protagonists, but of its characters, Barnstable is one of the more sympathetic ones, as a stranger in an ever-stranger land, set upon by the manipulative strategies of the locals. What he represents is not some symbolic Blackness, but a new order, a global order of profit-seeking corporations who would turn the whole world into a village, and in doing so, disrupt and erase the regional cultures of places like Virginia City, another resource hub on the great energy map of a united civilization. If his Blackness is symbolic, it is only to set him apart as an outsider, in such a way as to reveal the poisonous cabal of Silverdale and company for what they are, no different in their bearing than the Ku Klux Klan or any other militia fixated on the restoration of former glory.

Early in the film, Hobbs offers the image of the town dump—a cliff overtaken with bags of trash and abandoned vehicles. This foreshadows the film’s climax, in which the Godmonster, imprisoned like a sideshow attraction, is pushed down a garbage-strewn hill by an outraged mob of townspeople, and it subsequently explodes. The dump may be a reminder that the glory days of Virginia City are behind it, but it is also an image of the viscera of an evolving civilization. The voluminous runoff of the historical event isn’t gold and silver but phosphorous vapours, obsolescent tools and materials, everyday junk. The Godmonster represents an exception to this climbing pile of junk, an evolutionary wonder preserved, a monster out of prehistory recreated by an environmental disaster. It is twin to the town itself, a thing preserved, stuck out of time, and it reflects the conflicts of the town, an ancient thing reborn in the present, a commingling of old and new genes, old and new flesh, old and new pathways through a beastly evolution. Barnstable escapes vigilante justice just as the monster escapes Professor Clemens’s laboratory: both man and beast represent possible futures. The creature goes on a rampage through the town, a strange beast stalking the rocky Nevada terrain, a grotesque sculpture, made by Hobbs and in the style of his other sculptures, with bulbous papier-mâché features and a hide like an old rug. Its rampage brings the film to the heights of its surreal comedy, as the Godmonster terrorizes the community in a montage. As an entry in the Weird West subgenre, Godmonster enhances the mythology of its region with this rough beast, but it also leads the beast into an appropriately anachronistic trap: salvation by cowboy. The Godmonster is cornered and lassoed by a posse, trapped for Silverdale’s medicine show. Its capture is symbolic of Silverdale’s interests in the town, capturing and containing the past, suspending evolution—he holds the Godmonster captive much as he holds the town captive. The explosive destruction of the Godmonster in the film’s climax is only a temporary setback in its evolution: its resurrection is inevitable. Sheep are seen consuming, it is implied, the smoking phosphorus remains of the creature, setting in motion more mutations.

Silverdale’s conservation plan is to restore Virginia City through a new bonanza, one which will allow him to benefit while making the village even more of a circus. His goal, simply put, is to Make Virginia City Great Again, to rebuild a Bonanza Citadel, a tide of sudden prosperity fortified against the enemies of fortune, chief among them, change. As Barnstable tells him, “you haven’t restored the past, you’ve destroyed the future.” The geological record is reflected in the image of the histomap, a visualization of progress that seems modelled on the peeling layers of the mossy stone of the earth, third from the sun, its crust and mantle and cores giving way to pay streaks and fuel. In The Godmonster of Indian Flats, Virginia City is a mirage emerging from the fog of the past, hollowed out, a fragile shell. Silverdale’s final declaration, a mad howl that “time is the eternal judge of events,” is an an ironic, painful truth: Silverdale clings to the patina of a ruined civilization, ruined by men like him, and what Barnstable represents today is tomorrow’s bonanza citadel, destined for ruin, destined for nostalgia. Time is the eternal judge of events. Nothing is eternal but time, which may echo, but which never repeats.