Rosemary Mcleod: High Noon in law and order
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Rosemary McLeod
The other night I watched one of my favourite westerns, High Noon, again.
As usual, the main role is played by a gun. You might think that the actors are the thing, but in westerns, really all action and all resolution of problems rests with a gun. Building to that moment, characters fret about how and when to use it, wish they didn't have to, and act like right bastards if they are not Thinking Men but Evil Men. All this is prolonged, usually with a pretty girl in an uplift bra and bonnet involved, before decisive bullets solve all.
The main western theme, to my way of thinking, is justified homicide. There are others, like what it means to be a man, and whether people can live a life worth living in a state of lawlessness.
In High Noon there are many morals you can draw. One and most Thinking Man's westerns get round to this is that ordinary people have to stand up and be counted if they want to live in a civilised world. They have to back the forces of law and order, with their lives if necessary, or live as cowards, silently despised by their wives and children, the mere playthings of Evil Men. It's simple, but appealing and, I think, probably true.
Grace Kelly and Gary Cooper ride out of town at the end of High Noon after a terrific gunfight, having shamed a town. But real life isn't as measured, or as thoughtful, and Evil Men sometimes prevail.
My hunch is that whoever is finally found guilty of gunning down Auckland bottle store owner Navtej Singh last weekend will turn out to have gang connections. It would be nice to be wrong, but I wouldn't bet on it. What with gang people also accused of the fatal drive-by shooting of a two-year-old Wanganui girl, that would make for two impressive and typically cowardly gang achievements. I can understand why members of the Indian business communities in Auckland, too often the victims of armed robberies, might wish to arm themselves in self-defence.
We have an understanding with law enforcement that it will undertake our defence for us, because people in this country don't go about with guns. That surely means we merit a swift response to emergency calls when a man has been shot and wounded in the course of a crime. That did not happen last weekend.
But the real blame for Mr Singh's death lies with whoever cold-bloodedly shot him, not with the police. Focusing on what the police did is a distraction, the kind of distraction we go in for in this country, as if the police have to not only do their job, but compensate for the harm done by criminals as they go about it. We turn our attention invariably to them, holding up high expectations, while for criminals we make nothing but excuses. There will be people who by now half believe that the police and ambulance services caused Mr Singh's death, then, not the robbers at all. That's how we think here. I'm not sure why.
In a way, that Auckland shooting was a western in miniature.
Sikhs, and the Indian community in general, are a hard-working, law-abiding, devout people making their way in a new land.
They have hopes and dreams, like the townsfolk in westerns, and live family-centred lives.
Ranked against them are their polar opposites, people without respect or meaningful ties, whose sense of family is destructive, who are often drug-addled, impulsive and cruel. We don't say this, though. We like to focus on their personal problems, in order to "understand" them, not on the misery they cause.
This is where we differ from westerns and not only in lacking a hero to sort bad people out. You may find, in westerns, reasons why the Evil Men have become what they are, but those reasons are never magnified into excuses. And in the end they pay for what they've done by natural justice, in gunfights they initiate, making the hero justified in killing them.
Westerns, I realise, are out of fashion, and they're American anyway. But bear with me. I sometimes hanker after a world in which we'd all be clearer on right and wrong, in which criminals would be understood for what they are, not what we wish they were, and in which punishment would fit the crime more snugly than it does.
If this was America, the person eventually found guilty of pulling the trigger on Mr Singh would face the death penalty, and if we were honest, I think most of us would instinctively feel they deserved it.
We may be kinder in this country, we may not fight back like Gary Cooper, but that wasn't a lot of use to Mr Singh.
rosemary.mcleod@star-times.co.nz
- © Fairfax NZ News
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