Dear o dear. On account of a visit this evening, I won't actually be able to put much up today. I'm writing this just to show that if I could, I would put something up here, but sometimes you just can't.
Possible theme: Ineluctability of loyalty-obligations to family/ friends. Once they got you, you can't back out on nothing. Not even if it is a nice meal with some wine and maybe a pint!
Interestingly, loyalty and obligation is a major theme in Westerns. Although, most usually, it is played out as loyalty-obligation to family/tight peer group as against doing the social/legal/community 'right thing'. If Old Yeller was a true Western, the boy wouldn't have shot the dog. He would have gone in there with the shotgun and said "OK, Yeller. Let's get them bastards who's annoyin' you so much". Look how loyal Yeller was to that family. But instead of showing the "Nature" response of loyalty to kin, they showed the "Nurture" response of civilised types, no matter how hard it was (which is all the more civilised, no?).
Maybe the boys in that family had been civilised due to a lack of paternal influence - wasn't Daddy dead or something (long time since I saw it)? So, theoretically, maybe the boys were beyond the 'natural state' and already civilised. It doesn't really matter. I just wanted to see Yeller roaming the countryside, young fella on his back taking pot shots at teh targets too far away for the dog to tear apart with his foaming, bloody jaws.
Lesson for today: Bren's morality kinda sucks. It sure does.
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