"You're an unprincipled young man, Hud"

"The man with the barbed wire soul!"

This past weekend, as every authority told us to stay home so as to not risk spreading this terrible new coronavirus, I saw pictures of people packing bars and casinos. I even read defiant tweets from  loony right wingers who urged people to go out and not listen to the experts. These jerks tried to make themselves sound like they were bold rebels, standing up for the people's right to go to Applebee's or whatever, but as I read their calls to action, I have never seen more clearly that in America there is a very fine line between our cult of rugged individualism and mere selfishness.

It made me think of the 1963 movie "Hud," starring Paul Newman.

"Hud" is typically described as a revisionist western, but that label seems dodgy to me. The westerns of 70 years ago were themselves products of revisionist history, a way of glorifying the white man's conquest of North America. What we call "revisionist" westerns are often revising not the history, but examining the genre itself, examining its effect on American society.

Set in the present (the late '50s or early '60s) rather than in the days of the frontier, "Hud" is centered on Hud Bannon, a selfish, sexist, philandering, disrespectful asshole who is nonetheless beloved by almost everyone. Why?

Well, for one thing, Hud is played by the incredibly handsome Paul Newman. "Hud" was shot in black-and-white, so you don't get the full effect of his blue eyes, but as he poses in cowboy gear against a background of open range and big sky, Newman makes you see why that imagery sold a billion cigarettes.

You remember the Simpsons episode "New Kid on the Block," where Bart wonders why girls like Jimbo Jones? "He's just a good looking rebel who plays by his own rules," Bart says, and Lisa emits an involuntary sigh.

Hud's big conflict is with his father, Homer, played by Melvyn Douglas. The name is not meant to evoke Homer Simpson, but the Homer of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer represents tradition and community, bumping up against Hud, who represents rugged individualism.

Douglas was a debonair leading man before the war (including the great "Ninotchka," in which he plays the American who wins the heart of a Soviet woman played by Greta Garbo) but by 1963 his acting style seemed old-fashioned and stiff. Put him up against Paul Newman and it's no contest which one the audience wants to watch.

At one point, Homer says something about how a country can change over time when it looks up to the wrong kind of person. "You're an unprincipled young man, Hud," Homer says. Hud responds mockingly, "Well, you've got enough for the both of us."

This is a conflict we see a lot in American movies, from "The Wild Bunch" to "Footloose" and beyond, but the movies usually come down on the side of the individual. Not "Hud." Based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, "Hud" is clear about the fact that Hud is a villain. In a horrifying scene, he tries to rape Alma, a housekeeper, before being stopped by another man. (In the novel, where no one comes along to save her, Alma is called Halmea, and is described as an African American, which really drives home the ways the western myth ties into the worst of American history. Director Martin Ritt figured audiences wouldn't accept it, and introduced the rescue and turned the housekeeper into a white woman.) So, even as we can't take our eyes off Paul Newman, clearly we are supposed to know he's not someone we should idolize.

What does any of this have to do with our pandemic? The big conflict between Homer and Hud is over some diseased cattle. Once he discovers that the animals have hoof-and-mouth disease, he contacts the government, which instructs him to turn them over to be killed, so that they will not infect other ranches. Hud thinks his father is a fool to do this, and tries to find someone to buy them, without letting them know the animals are diseased. Presumably, the buyer will bring them back to his ranch, where he will infect the rest of his herd, and sell some of them off to infect other herds, and soon there will be a serious epidemic.

Hud is instantly recognizable as one of America's favorite kinds of fictional heroes, in our movies, TV, music, comic books, cigarette ads, etc. Look at him closely and you see he's like one of those spring break partiers, or one of those right-wing tweeters -- or, if you really want to dig into it, like an anti-vaxxer or a climate change-denier, or a mortgage-baked securities trader circa 2007, or so many other types of people who want to get theirs, even if it means causing harm to others.