Reel History 14: Walker

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At one point in Walker, two characters are riding in a horse-drawn carriage   reading Time and People, discussing the affairs of William Walker, whose face graces the cover of both magazines. Quick cut to a car aggressively passing the carriage.

The year is 1856, and William Walker has just made himself president of Nicaragua.

Alex Cox's 1987 movie of the whole story is, to put it mildly, straight-up bizarre. It was filmed in Nicaragua with the complete cooperation of the Sandinista government, shortly after it was revealed that the American government had secretly funded the opposing right-wing Contras through illegal arms sales to Iran. It was a movie that ruined the director's mainstream career, and Cox (whose filmography includes Sid and Nancy and Repo Man) was never employed to make a major studio film again. It's not hard to see why: Walker performed poorly both at the box office and with critics. It's an anti-epic, an affront to the way paved by movies about unhinged anti-heroes like Lawrence of Arabia. But that's what I think makes it such an interesting movie to watch.

To be fair to the director, the story of William Walker is straight-up bizarre in real life; Cox's research probably lead to the conclusion that any depiction of the events would be weird, so he might as well make a contemporary political point at the same time.

William Walker was a a pirate to some, a hero to others, but the contemporary view is that he was a wannabe conquistador with a serious Messiah complex. His support came from forces in Nicaragua who saw his firepower as an answer to their problems, and wealthy Americans who wanted to control the accessible transportation system across Nicaragua which supplied San Francisco with goods from New York (this was before both the Panama Canal and a transcontinental railroad). Taking advantage of a civil war erupting in the country in 1854, and with the help of the Democratic Party (of Nicaragua), he defeated the rival Legitimist party and declared himself head of state in September 1855. Walker's process was known as 'filibustering', which back then meant taking an unauthorized military expedition into a foreign country in the hopes of starting or supporting a revolution. This wasn't his first attempt- he tried 'filibustering' in the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja to unfulfilled ends- but he found success in Nicaragua, and inspiration in the ideals of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny told generations of Americans that the North American continent was destined to be controlled by them, and it was an idea that found legitimacy in the political elite. President Franklin Pierce even recognized Walker's government the following year.

American Progress by John Gast, 1872
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Walker's plans were a lot grander, however, and he looked to take on all of Central America under his utopian wing. He had pissed off some of the most powerful people in the America, including Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt (played in the movie by Peter Boyle), who was not only one of the wealthiest people in the United States in the 1850s, but one of the wealthiest people in American history. After soliciting funds from two of Vanderbilt's former investors-turned-competitors, who were attempting to replace Vanderbilt's transportation system with a train, Walker found himself faced with an angry tycoon and a number of empires scared of his influence, including the British in Belize. When his tenuous grasp eventually gave out under intense pressure from neighbouring countries who did not, in fact, want to be 'emancipated', he surrendered himself to an American admiral in 1857 and made it back to New York and a hero's welcome. But you can't keep a good filibusterer down, and in 1860 he tried to return to Central America with plans to set up an English-speaking independent colony on the nearby Bay Islands. Unfortunately for him, he was captured by the British Navy soon after landing in Honduras. The British handed Walker over to the Honduran government, who executed him by firing squad on September 12, 1860.

Cox follows the general outline of Walker's life pretty faithfully regardless of the anachronisms, and he applied a dream-like filter to make the movie feel like a psychotic Western. Cox isn't subtle about Walker's politics; he filmed a movie about an American intervening in the affairs of Central America while America actively intervened in the affairs of Central America, so there's no other way to interpret it other than a strict condemnation of the long, bloody history of American influence in Central America since the Monroe Doctrine. Cox, in his own esoteric manner, firmly denounces the idea of Manifest Destiny and its 1980s equivalent, where American-approved right wing politics, no matter how authoritarian and violent, were better than any form of left-wing government.

He uses incredibly obvious anachronisms, from the aforementioned contemporary magazines to Zippo lighters, to make sure the audience realizes that what Walker did was no different than what the Reagan administration was doing at the time. In the movie, as his capital burns around him, black military helicopters and marines drop in unexpectedly to 'save' William Walker and his comrades. This references Walker finding salvation by turning himself over to American authorities when all of Central America was lining up to show him how they feel about his experiments in government. Cox is saying that no matter what the United States does, whether it's overthrowing a government explicitly or implicitly, the consequences will never hit close to home. The United States, its people and its interests will never feel the impact of its actions.

The people who did suffer those consequences are the ones America tried to save from themselves. With today's audience being so far removed from this history, combined with the sheer volume of contemporary leftist criticism, it seems like a rather cliched message for Cox to convey. But he conveyed it in the most direct way at a time when the country was at its most conservative; whether or not you agree with the politics, it definitely adds more gravitas to his and the film's legacy.