What to Stream: “Posse,” a Wild Western of High Purpose

Whether in art-house films or in Hollywood spectacles, there’s no conflict between audacious style and confrontational politics, which converge to grand yet scathing effect in Mario Van Peebles’s “Posse,” from 1993. It’s one of the great modern Westerns, and it’s now streaming widely, including on Pluto TV and the Roku Channel. The coincidence of its arrival on Pluto TV, in August, with a Film Forum retrospective of films by the French director Alain Resnais is a useful reminder of what connects the art-house and Hollywood traditions. Resnais, especially in his early films (such as “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Muriel”), delivers sharp political reckonings—and the politics of memory itself—with a uniquely rarefied and formalist aestheticism. For Van Peebles, the flash and the flair of “Posse,” along with its distinctive, flashback-centered form, serve a similar and mighty purpose: to get beyond movie myths and reveal the truth of the Wild West, and of American history over all, by way of those who remembered that history but were long ignored. As in some of Resnais’s best films, Van Peebles—working in an altogether more populist and bustling manner—dramatizes memory as action, as a form of activism.

“Posse” is centered on the lives of Black people—townspeople, cowboys, even sheriffs—in the nineteenth-century West. It’s a wild and picaresque adventure that’s made taut by a steadfast and passionate sense of principle, provided as much by the filmmaker as by the film’s protagonists, not least because Van Peebles also stars—as Jesse Lee, an involuntary recruit in the Spanish-American War. The action begins in Cuba, in 1898, where Jesse, a convict sentenced to lifetime military service, is the leader of a mostly Black regiment that’s sent on a suicide mission by the racist Colonel Graham (Billy Zane). Jesse leads a group of three Black soldiers and one white soldier in a revolt against the Colonel, and they sneak back to the United States, a stolen chest of gold coins in tow, via the comedic conceit of taking the place of corpses. Reaching New Orleans—and joined there by a gambler called Father Time (Big Daddy Kane)—the band of deserters puts their trust in Jesse to keep them a step ahead of the law and the Colonel, who’s in hot pursuit. But Jesse has something more in mind than mere survival. He is haunted by memories of fire, destruction, and the killing of Black people by white lawmen and vigilantes, memories that are rendered in stark, nightmarish, and fragmentary black-and-white flashbacks. In quest of revenge, he brings his group to the so-called Western frontier, to the town where he grew up—and where those horrific visions were his realities.

What is the story that needs to be told, and how does it get told? This is the overarching tension of “Posse.” The film’s flamboyant and rowdy action is held inside a framing device of an unnamed, elderly Black man reminiscing about the group of six, dubbing them the “original posse,” and delivering a history lesson: almost a third of all late-nineteenth-century American cowboys—and half the original settlers of Los Angeles—were Black. The identity of this character converges with that of the actor himself, in a stroke of casting genius: the narrator is played by Woody Strode, born in 1914, who played the title role in John Ford’s 1960 Western “Sergeant Rutledge,” set in 1881, about the racist persecution of a Black officer. The intersection of history and myth, the inseparability of history from the voices of personal testimony, the decisive power of commemoration and transmission: these are the very subjects of “Posse.” Throughout, Van Peebles nods to the mythic power of classic Westerns while infusing its tropes with different, wider-ranging historical substance and presenting new heroes to embody it. As in Ford’s Westerns, it’s striking that the film’s deep-rooted and deeply felt intellectual considerations receive such a vigorous, thrilling, complex, and, at times, even raucously humorous dramatic treatment.

The story that Van Peebles tells (working with a script by Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane) is a vast excavation of the crimes and sins on which the United States is based. It’s a tale of military adventurism, colonial expansionism, crony capitalism, deceitful political maneuvering, the repressive sham of law and order—and the underlying premise of white supremacy on which these abuses depend. Jesse grew up in a town called Freemanville, a settlement of Black people that’s involuntarily twinned with the neighboring white outpost of Cutterstown, which is run by a despotic and sadistic sheriff named Bates (Richard Jordan). Bates’s interests are both violent and mercenary, and he uses the power of the purse to win the complicity of Freemanville’s Black sheriff, Carver (Blair Underwood), in his schemes. A crucial aspect of “Posse” is the discovery of Bates’s schemes—the recognition of them by way of memory, knowledge, and education, which also provides the crucial basis for resistance.

The pivot of Jesse’s haunting memories involves his father, King David (Robert Hooks), who was murdered for building a school emblazoned with the slogan “Education is freedom.” Jesse is, in effect, a man of the book, toting around a small and precious volume containing a poem about the life of an enslaved man that begins “Nicodemus was a slave of African birth.” (The poem was published, anonymously, in 1877, to promote a Black settlement named Nicodemus, in Kansas). The book, which Jesse gives to the illiterate Obobo (Tom Lister, Jr.), the posse’s mightiest warrior, takes on a symbolic function—an artistic trace of a history that, then as now, is at risk of suppression. Transmission and mentorship are built even deeper into the story through the cast of characters, which includes the elder Papa Joe, Jesse’s mentor; he’s played by Melvin Van Peebles, the seminal modern director who is also Mario Van Peebles’s father. (Papa Joe’s daughter, Lana, played by Salli Richardson-Whitfield, is the town’s schoolteacher.)

The plot depends significantly on the recognition and the effect of the genocidal displacement of Native Americans and the oppressive conditions endured by Chinese laborers; it also involves the explicitly cited “grandfather clause,” which mandated that any Black person who had a grandfather that was enslaved, and therefore ineligible to vote, was also barred from voting. For all its historical excavation, “Posse” is a tale of exuberance, of florid personalities whose idiosyncrasies and audacities, whose pleasures and mishaps, are also the essence of history. Along with the steadfast Obobo and the brash and composed Father Time, there’s the stylish Angel (Tone Loc), the sly and insolent Little J (Stephen Baldwin), and, the loquacious, impetuous, and discerning Weezie (Charles Lane), who had the misfortune to serve the Colonel and the daring to change sides under pressure, and whose antic chatter serves as something like the externalization of conscience in the heat of struggle. The storyteller played by Strode brings these outsized personalities to life in an outsized, outrageous telling, and in doing so joins Van Peebles in uniting myth and history.

“Posse” shows an artistic consciousness at work along with a political one. The film’s joy in talk—and in wit, in music, in poetry, in costume and dance and play—is as much a matter of the embodiment of consciousness as the recognition and redressing of the crimes of history. Though the drama is often grim and fearsome, the improvised maneuvers and daring exploits of the titular posse, for all their mortal ferocity, have a joyful energy that reflects something more than survival—they reflect the constructive vigor, the collective purpose of the Black community. The protagonists’ personal bearing is itself a matter of style; or, rather, the posse’s style is a matter of identity, of self-assertion, of endurance. Van Peebles, directing the movie with exuberance and elegance, both depicts this history of style and advances it as a modern ideal. ♦