Beer for My Horses

Yes, really, I really watched this one.

Most of last summer I was keeping track of upcoming movie releases by the trailers I saw in the theaters in my hometown. I figured that some indy movies might escape me that way, but that all the ordinary studio releases would come through town.

Turns out I was wrong. In August, as I was planning my cross-country road trip, I used the Google movies tool to research the theaters that lay along my intended route, thinking I might be able to keep current along the way (as I mentioned, I was not, but had to later catch up).

As I was perusing the theater listing across eastern Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa, I was not surprised to see multiplexes showing the same movies as in my hometown, but there was also a curious addition---Beer for My Horses. In August it was playing at nearly every multiplex I found, except the ones in northern Colorado.

WTF? How could this be?

In short order I found out that the movie stars country singer Toby Keith, famous for his millenial honky tonk ballads, and perhaps most notably for "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)", a post 9-11 revenge ballad about bombing the crap out of Muslims.

"Sheesh," I thought, "this is gonna be a real winner."

Yep, it's a real winner. Fortunately I was spared the effort of seeing it a theater, or even having to put it in my Netflix queue. Turns out that it was an original production of CMT, the country music video channel, which did me the courtesy of airing it a couple nights ago. Not wanting to force my sister and her husband to watch it with me, I TiVoed it and watched it late last night after they retired to bed.

From the title, I figured it was in the genre of goofy movies like the ones starring Larry the Cable Guy. But I was wrong. Toby Keith is a serious man, and this movie was serious fare. As it happens, the title comes from a Keith song (video) about taking a hard line against the scum of society that plague us, and that includes the line "We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces, singing 'Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses'." Too bad. I was looking forward to drunken farm animals.

The movie had the same theme. It goes something like this: once upon a time there was a mythical faraway place in America called Oklahoma, full of wide open farms and good, hard-working, heterosexual white folk, as well as few miscreants who had no business being in such a paradise in the first place. If this place "Oklahoma" actually existed, it would probably be a stronghold of right-wing Bush voters.

Toby Keith is a red-blooded deputy sheriff who likes the way his girlfriend's butt moves as she walks down the street. We know this because of the way the camera zooms in on her derriere. He bonds with other men primarily when they have firearms in their hands, either hunting animals or hunting evil humans.

The paradise of his small-town is disturbed by a meth gang that is run by, gasp, Messicans. The Messicans are aided by corrupt local companies, and by a scheming lawyer who is probably a liberal, and who abuses things like habeas corpus to keep the evils Messicans from rotting in jail where they belong.

In the inevitably conflict between the Oklahomans and the Messicans-aided-by-greedy-white people, the deputy's red-blooded woman is kidnapped and taken away to an evil hideout in Mexico. Although Tom Skerrit, the sheriff, tells him not to go, Toby Keith does what a man has to do, and breaks the law to go into Mexico by himself. On the way through Texas, they meet a host of crazy circus freaks (probably Austinites) led by Willie Nelson, whom they dislike at first (who would?). Nelson earns their trust by giving them some homemade liquor. They also meet some negroes, the only ones in the movie, who of course threaten them, but are easily pacified by the singing of old Motown standards. Turns out that negroes will break into song and dance at a moment's notice when they hear music that they like.

Although the odds are stacked against them, Toby Keith and his friends are able to triumph by their superior white ability to dodge bullets while leaping sideways through the air and firing both pistols at once. Also they have an ace-in-the-hole in the form of silent Wango-Tango crazy superman Ted Nugent and his inerrant hunting bow.

They kill the Messicans at the hideout, including the top drug lord, retrieve the red-blooded Oklahoma girl, and restore white order and justice to the world. Tom Skerrit tells Keith that he ought to be punished for breaking the law, but he decides "screw it" after taking a shot of whiskey with them. Everyone is happy. The end.

By similarities of the story, it was obvious that this movie was the redneck response to No Country for Old Men, but stripped of all the intricate issues of the Coen Brothers movies (whatever they were). Texas, as it turns out, is way too contaminated with too much "grey area" thinking. In the mythical land of Oklahoma, however, everything is cut and dry, except the law, which only applies to bad people at the discretion of deputy sheriffs.

With its absolute moral clarity, xenophobia, distrust for the rule of law, and undertones of white supremacy, much of the movie had an eerie similarity to the Hunter episodes circa 1986 about the evil Colombian drug lords menacing good old Los Angeles. Keith rescuing his girlfriend was almost an exact rerun of Fred Dryer's Sgt. Hunter rescuing Didi McCall.

Perhaps the most iconographic scene happens when Keith's band of rescuers is on their way through Texas in their monster Ford pick-up truck. When the truck breaks down, their evil Messican hostage starts waddling down the road in handcuffs, trying to escape like the lousy cockroach that he is. Keith nonchalantly tells his boys, "Will somebody please get the Mexican?" Wango-Tango whiteman Nugent draws out his super bow, but is told that is too extreme. So instead he brings out a slingshot, loads it with a rock, and nails the brown-skinned bastard fugitive from a hundred yards. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! This is exactly the way the world should operate, no?

Watching the movie on TiVo, I got to fast forward through the many, many commercials on CMT, although from time to time a pop-up would appear in the movie announcing that the DVD was now on sale at Wal-Mart.