Rudolph, the red-nosed alcoholic

This Christmas season at the movies has left me feeling, well, slightly hoarse. Based on that pun alone you might have an idea of what I'm intending to talk about here, and if so, I apologise at the outset for inflicting such a stinker upon ye good people of the Internet straight out of the gate. If not, well, that doesn't matter, that just means I got away with it. Twice. Phew, I guess.

So it's summer blockbuster territory for those of us who are south-of-the-border, while it's non-denominational holiday blockbuster territory for all those, ahem, normal people up north. You may have noticed a certain picture focusing around a roving young stallion being sent off to fight and die in a miserable horrific conflict in Europe's past has been the recipient of a surprisingly intense marketing push given its competition with other, higher-profile sequels and followups that are due to hit theatres this season. Hmmm, I suppose that description reveals quite a bit in itself. Violence! People like violence. Give the people blood and guts and pinata parties gone horribly wrong in the Colosseum sands I say. Right?

The point is, the comparatively aggressive promotion for Steven Spielberg's War Horse has been the catalyst for me doing no small amount of head-scratching and wondering: are we seeing the emergence of a “horse movie” subgenre within the drama film category, and if so, what is it about the “horse movie” that holds so much appeal to a wide audience?

As soon as I started considering the former question I had a couple of early examples I could raffle off in somewhat arguably flimsy support of the whole sordid affair and here they are: The Horse Whisperer, Hidalgo and Sea-fucking-biscuit. Not much to build an empire on, for sure, but the Mongolians did it with less. Nearest as I can see, the narratives contained within these movies all hold the following in common:

They focus first and foremost on the horse as a character in its own right, if not the primary protagonist altogether. Perhaps given that a studio can't predict the subjective appeal/bankability of a particular lead human actor to one member of the audience or another, it's safer just to assume that everyone likes horses and will thus rally in support of an anthropomorphic protagonist. Animals can't speak (parrots and dolphins please place yourselves in the temporary self-designated Exclusion Zone visible in the corner) so to some extent, we as audience can project onto them whatever personality we relate to. Nonetheless...

The horse is an animal with recognisably human idiosyncrasies. This is what I could and will call the inevitable “cute factor”. Horses are also not unlike us in other ways - they're temperamental, they can feel pain and we can empathise with their suffering. There is also a sense of impenetrable loyalty in their actions, particularly in movies such as Hidalgo where a bond is shown gradually developing between horse and master (notably, this is subverted for comic effect in the Zorro movies) But...

Horses also possess attributes we ourselves would willingly possess. Strength, speed, majesty – who wouldn't want these as physical traits? Or, in a more abstract sense, the ability to literally just focus on a goal and run full tilt at it- bravely shrugging off whatever life throws in your way. We also project onto ourselves the desire to possess the characteristics of the person riding the horse. Aristocratic dashing cavalry officers, cowboys, knights in armour, impossibly regal elven queens moving soundlessly through the forest while a hapless courtier rides in front to throw his cloak or himself over muddy potholes so she can cross. None of these guys is exactly chewing the proverbial plankton off the floor of the food chain's country franchise outlet. (God that was a terrible metaphor, even by my standards) The horse functions as a symbolic metaphor for speed, power, courage and grace and it shares these attributes with its rider – they are ultimately inseparable as an image of subjective, abstract desire.

We recognise in the horse a yearning for the pastoral ideal. My childhood memories of playing the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time largely consist of gritted teeth, smashed tv screens (blatantly untrue) and generic little-shit frustration at being unable to win that bloody Golden Scale by coughing up a 20 pound hake to the capitalistic owner. But those that don't have a certain nostalgia for the times spent larking in Hyrule Field, galloping Epona in circles and firing fire arrows into the distance to hit some poor unsuspecting subsistence farmer's prize pumpkins, or riding to the crest of a hill to simply sit and watch the sun go down in all its 1997 graphics era-lens flarey goodness. Do all horses live such carefree lives as this? I would guess not. 

But that doesn't really matter. We assign the horse an idyllic existence, a place in the mind with the boundless freedom of wide-open plains. This is of course a whole world away from the cramped-cubicle office compartments, car interiors or concrete Fuhrerbunkers that many of us inhabit in cold stark reality. This imagined life of the horse seems somehow more “natural” or “essential” than what a certain cross-section of human life seems to consist of these days. It connects with us at a primal level, because we recognise our own yearnings to be out on those open plains with the freedom to go anywhere and do anything we want without a care in the world. It's a powerful association. 

Now, my immediate conclusion for the next logical place that Hollywood could go as far as specific-animal movie genres was, naturally the dinosaur film, and I even had a snide joke lined up with exactly this slant. It would have involved me having a good chuckle over the outlandishness of such a thing and posting a jpeg of the Philosoraptor as guest star to end on a vaguely Platonic note. But then I realised it wasn't outlandish, and how close to the truth that idea actually was, and it kind of wasn't really funny anymore, if it ever was to begin with. Jurassicparkgodzilladinosauriceageserieskingkongjustaboutanymonstermovieevermade. Um, yes.

So there we have it, the outlines of what I would consider the horse genre in popular Western cinema. I hope that's something to build the foundations of a taxonomy on. Meanwhile, I've got to go clean my room and vacuum the carpet. Fresh straw doesn't replace itself, you know.