Shot in Nicaragua during the midst of the Contra War, Alex Cox pretty much blew up his Hollywood career making this film.* To be fair, the extent to which he had a Hollywood career as people understand it is perhaps debateable; Repo Man (1984) was a negative pickup for Universal rather than something they directly produced and funded, Sid & Nancy (1986) was a mostly British production with some funding from Embassy’s home video branch, and really who knows what the deal with Straight to Hell (1987) was… other than Cox, who details it fairly well on his website (the gist is that it was fairly straight up sans studio as well). Well, anyway, as far as I can tell, perhaps buoyed by the eventual success of Repo Man and by having some prominent names connected, it doesn’t seem like Walker had quite so many strings attached to Universal’s purse. If only they knew what they were getting into.

Yeah, so Walker is the true-ish story of William Walker, played here by Ed Harris. I say, “true-ish”, because, you know, the odds of a film being an entirely accurate recount of history is basically nil. Not just biopics or historical dramas or whatever, even documentaries are inevitably skewed by biases. Hell, not even really any thing; you know what they say about history being written by the victors. 100% impartiality is probably an unobtainable dream. Cox, for his part, doesn’t bother with trying to pretend to be historically accurate, with the film getting progressively more anachronistic (and more blatantly so) as it goes on.

Who was William Walker? So, then, William Walker was what was known in the trade as a filibuster. While nowadays this refers more-or-less exclusively to the thing where politicians don’t shut up in order to prevent the parliament/congress/whatever from actually continuing, prior to this it referred to like a person who goes on an unauthorised military expedition abroad. I say ‘unauthorised’, though that’s more officially rather than necessarily in actuality. In particular, it tends to refer to private U.S. citizens who went on this sort of dalliance in Latin America in the 1800s. There was a lot of it going around, and Walker is perhaps the ur-example. In the 1850s, Walker, a staunch believer in Manifest Destiny,† invaded and successfully captured the Mexican territory of Baja California with a modest force of 45 men, and set about trying to capture the neighbouring Sonora; these would form the basis for an independent state which would later join the United States. This failed, he went back to America and was put on trial due to the whole thing being a rather flagrant violation of the law, but fear not film fans, for he was quickly acquitted, because the general populace at the time just bloody loved the idea of forcibly annexing bits of the continent in the name of Manifest Destiny that much. That’s a lot of words for something that’s quite a small part of the film. It’s more concerned with his follow up expedition to Nicaragua. Following the death of his fiancée (Marlee Matlin), Walker is given the opportunity by shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle) to go to Nicaragua to assist in their civil war; his own interest being to shore up his rights to a key shipping route. The Nicaraguan Democratic Party was losing and sought outside assistance, and so granted citizenship to Walker and his men to get around the legal problem of his earlier effort. This doesn’t exactly work out for them. Walker and his forces succeed in helping to topple the Legitimist capital,‡ and he pretty much immediately takes the power for himself.

This is probably a bit more that I’d usually put in the synopsis bit, but then this is based on actual events, so… I mean, while bits are rather fast and loose due to plotting convenience, the general gist is pretty well out there. Still, I suppose this is a side of history America would prefer to avoid talking about and perhaps pretend wasn’t a thing, so it seems entirely feasible to be unaware of it. On the other hand, that he’d make his own naked power grab should be obvious and inevitable even if you’re unfamiliar.

This all went down like a lead balloon in the ‘80s, because, wouldn’t you know, the US was interfering in Nicaraguan politics for their own ends at the time. The film makes very little bones about the fact that Walker’s exploits are hardly an aberration in the history of US foreign policy, although in that case it was perhaps more of wilfully turning a blind eye to what was happening rather than outright meddling either by proxy or official intervention. It’s not subtle. In case you somehow got through the film and missed it, there’s a whole load of footage of Ronald Reagan pontificating on the alleged Sandinista menace and of the then ongoing US backed conflict alongside the end credits.

Of course, you have to be utterly impervious to… pretty much anything to make it that far and not get what it’s going for. Though frankly given the level of discourse on the internet, I suppose it’d be naïve of me to be surprised if people didn’t get it, or indeed if they made it through the end credits and still didn’t. Films don’t meeeaaan anything. They’re just a sequence of photographs played in rapid succession, usually with synchronised sound.

In real life, the film sets up its tone from the off, with some incongruous jazzy Latin tunes over some copious bloodshed and carnage and a narrator who tells us what’s going on, except what the narrator’s hagiographical commentary is completely at odds with what’s being displayed on screen. The latter part is a recurring bit; the people back home, and thus the audience, are kept abreast of the good news coming from Walker’s campaigns, though the audience, unlike said people back home, are privy to this being nonsense.

The Hollywood way to make Walker would have been to tell it from the viewpoint of a sympathetic humane journalist – a film like Under Fire (1983) or The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). But Rudy Wurlitzer – who wrote the script – and I were opposed to that. There were no ‘good’ journalists in Walker’s retinue. His men were pirates, gangsters, would-be slave-owners. And the Nicaraguans who supported him were just as villainous. In other words, nothing had changed in the 140 odd years between Walker’s genocidal campaign and that of Oliver North and his goons. We had to show them as they were, and to make the point that the politics and the murders and the cover-ups of 1986 and 1855 were no different. Walker’s tame journalist Byron Cole was the same as the man from the New York Times.

Cox

For all the claims of protecting the country from oppression and exploitation, this is what is ultimately being sold. The hype continues unabated, might makes right, and the drift towards despotism is assured. Harris plays Walker with a quiet intensity, even as he becomes progressively more unhinged in his actions, he manages to underplay it considerably. No matter how theoretically cartoonish his madness becomes, he never plays it as such. It’s instead played with a grim seriousness that only serves to exemplify the absurdity and horror of the scenario. Bear in mind that before the film ends there’s a scene wherein he eats human flesh, so managing to play the whole thing on an even (well, supposedly) keel takes some doing. The film never really loses that, in his diseased mind, he really does believe he’s doing the best thing for everyone; it’s not for him, it’s not even just for America, it’s for all mankind and the entire world. His nigh messianic self-belief in his own righteousness is what differentiates him from those around him who transparently seek to spoils, and is the key to his sway over them and to his unsettling role in events.

As I say, this pretty much put an end to Cox’s time as a studio player, such as it was. Universal was apparently expecting some kind of rollicking adventure and instead got a violent and blackly comic look at a nastier part of American history that managed to upset both sides of discourse, with Wurlitzer saying “The liberals hated us for the outrageous humor of such a sacred subject, and as for the conservatives, well, you know, they would hate us in any case” [Wurlitzer, cited in Neill]. The Iran-Contra affair was leaked in late ’86 and reports on the Contras’ atrocities were printed in ’85, sparking either outrage or denial depending on source (the ‘fake news’ claim is nothing new apparently), priming the film to land with an almighty thud regardless. Universal still don’t quite seem to know what to do with it, but despite its Nicaraguan setting, its commentary still feels relevant. There’s literally a part where the militia are informed that they’ll be ‘welcomed as liberators’.

* Apparently, this was ‘officially’ set up as a Mexican production, like the earlier Nicaraguan set Under Fire a few years prior, with the location shifting to Nicaragua shortly before shooting due to ostensible budgetary concerns. It’s rather implied that this was always planned to happen; presumably Universal wouldn’t have agreed upfront to actually making it in Nicaragua.

† For the unaware, the simple version of Manifest Destiny was that it was the belief that it was God’s will that the United States expand westward to take over the entire continent. This was, suffice to say, largely an excuse for imperialism and ethnic cleansing and genocide and that, but, you know, with a religious bent, so people were cool with it. Except for the ones on the receiving end.

‡ That is to say the capital of the Legitimist Party, not the ‘legitimate’ capital. The two parties had different bases, the Legitimists in Granada and the Democrats in Léon, and prior to the establishment of Managua as the national capital in 1852 the ostensible capital switched between the two depending on which was in power. Managua is roughly in the middle of the two, so was deemed the logical compromise between the two bases. I wouldn’t feel too bad for the Legitimists by the way; despite the name, it’s suggested that they may have rigged the election that they won shortly prior to this bout of civil war, and they did immediately move the government from Managua to Granada on victory and ram through a new constitution to restore power to the oligarchy prior to the bulk of the opposition’s arrival in Granada.