Rob Roy

31/12/2022

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Giving Texture to Tartanry

It isn’t easy to imagine that a part of the country known for its unrest, for being seen within the wider nation as terroristic, would go on to become an acceptable, even foremost, part of the United Kingdom's identity. But that is exactly what happened to the Highlands and the clan system as the kilt and its accoutrements became first banned, and then later reintroduced quite deliberately. In 1746, the British government brought in the Dress Act: “From and after the first day of August, one thousand seven hundred and forty seven, no Man or Boy, within that part of Great Britain called Scotland, other than such as shall be employed as Officers and Soldiers in His Majesty's Forces, shall, on any pretence whatsoever wear or put on the Clothes commonly called Highland Clothes (that is to say) the Plaid, Philabeg, or little Kilt, Trowse, Shoulder Belts, or any part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland Garb; and that no Tartan, or party-coloured Plaid or Stuff shall be used for Great Coats, or for Upper Coats.” (Scottish Tartans Authority) Just over thirty years later, the Highland Society in London’s “avowed intention was the preservation of the law forbidding the wearing of the Highland dress in Scotland” (The Scottish Nation) before the law was changed in 1782. By 1822, the wearing of plaid was not only acceptable, it became normalised. As Tom Devine says, “the apotheosis of this transformation came in 1822 with the remarkable celebration of the visit of George IV to Edinburgh…He was the first monarch to set foot in Scotland since Charles II in 1651.” Devine tells us that the “king spent two weeks in the Scottish capital and a series of extraordinary pageants, all with a Celtic and Highland flavour, were stage-managed by Sir Walter Scott for his delectation. What ensued was a ‘plaided panorama’ based on fake Highland regalia and the mythical customs and traditions of the clans.” (The Scottish Nation) 

   If a century earlier the Union was in a state of constant fret over a Jacobite rebellion, in the early 19th century we had the Jacobite image co-opted into a safe, Hanovarian notion of the Highlands. And behind this image was of course Walter Scott, a writer whose enormous reputation during the 19th century became a problematic one for much of the 20th. As Cairns Craig notes, “The disparagement of Walter Scott's 'romantic' Scotland rose in an intensifying crescendo in the years after the Second World War, culminating in Robin Jenkins's Fergus Lamont in 1978 - in which the protagonist declares that it was his ambition to be like Walter Scott, to 'write about common people and consort with nobility’ — and in Murray and Barbara Grigor's 'Scotch Myths' exhibition of 1981, which presented the history of Scotland's representation in the kitsch of postcards and shortbread tins.” (‘Constituting Scotland’)

This has led to a disparaging of all things that fall under Tartanry, to assume as a default position that anything which suggests plaid, rolling hills and lilting music should be viewed with at least suspicion. Emily Torricelli says the Pixar film “Brave…in this respect... has much in common with other films such as Highlander and Rob Roy that construct Scotland as a fantasy or historical space.” (‘Digital Places, Feminine Spaces: Scotland Re-gendered in Twenty-first Century Film’) Robert A. Morace says while speaking favourably of Trainspotting the film that it came out between “two especially bloody hymns to Scottish manhood, Rob Roy, and the even more egregious and insidious) Braveheart.” (Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting) Here the assumption is that Tartanry is bad and any film interested in engaging with this view of Scotland must be seen negatively. But it seems to us that though Braveheart (and Brave and Highlander) and Rob Roy exist in ostensibly the same world, there is a world of a difference between them: that Rob Roy if looked at closely enough deconstructs and reconstitutes Tartanry just as Local Hero, for example, interrogated the assumptions behind kailyard, behind the idea of Scotland as a place of quaint villages and loveable folk. 

But before defending the film let us accept this is a Hollywood production no matter if it was written and directed by Scotsmen: Alan Sharp and Michael Caton-Jones. It was produced by MGM/UA, had a German cinematographer who would go on to shoot Independence Day, the Coen brothers’ composer Carter Burwell, and a cast that includes the Irish Liam Neeson as Rob Roy McGregor, the American Jessica Lange as his wife Mary, and the American Eric Stoltz has his best friend. Hardly a home-grown production, but what Sharp gives to the film is an American generic sensibility all the better to give texture to Tartanry. Sharp does so by utilising the genres he worked within when working Stateside: the Western (Ulzana’s Raid; The Hired Hand) and the film noir (The Last Run; Night Moves), showing an interest in the showdown and the land evident in the former, and the serpentine relationship with motive in the latter. Critics may have played up an effeminacy of the film’s villain Archibald Cunningham (Tim Roth), seeing in the role negative stereotypes of homosexuality, with James R. Keller saying “a substantial part of the dialogue and imagery is committed to maintaining the association between Archie and same-sex practices” (‘Masculinity and Marginality in Rob Roy’). But what matters chiefly is the complexity of Archibald’s machinations. He is a man who thinks ahead not only for his own gain but for the maximum amount of displeasure to others, as though it isn’t that Archibald has homosexual inclinations (though he may) but that he has properly perverse ones that go far beyond the parameters of given sexuality, however apparently dissident. If a gay man may merely be seeking a particular pleasure that is deemed unacceptable in a given culture, the perversity of the position is a societal problem much more than an individual one — changes to the society allow a person deemed a pervert to become an acceptable member of that society without any need to change their behaviour. The homosexual is ‘merely’ a pervert but that perversity is society’s problem not his. When society changes the ‘problem’ goes away. To claim Archibald as a gay man and to see the film presenting him negatively, is to say almost nothing about his character and about the film. Archibald is much more perverse than ‘pervert’, someone for whom societal acceptance would be unlikely to alter the sort of games he insists on playing as he relishes making other people’s lives a misery.  

In the film, Archibald is apparently in Scotland escaping debts and making money for the Lord (Montrose) he is staying with by getting into and winning wagers on sword fights that his odious behaviour instigates and that his brilliance with a blade allows him to win. A conventionally motivated character would be happy enough trying to pay off his debts this way and, finding that he can’t, cook up another plan to do so. This is exactly what he does when Rob Roy borrows a £1,000 from Montrose, intending to make a good profit by buying cattle in Crieff and taking it down to Carlisle where the price is much higher. Archie has other ideas and involves Melrose’s factor, Killearn (Brian Cox), who, rather than giving Rob Roy’s friend Alan McDonald (Stoltz) a promissory note, offers instead cash. Melrose is off in Edinburgh and then continuing on to London and hasn’t signed the note. McDonald needs the money now, reluctantly accepts cash and when on his travels, McDonald gets stopped by Cunningham, who takes the money and kills him. Cunningham hasn’t just gone off with the cash, he will also be well aware that he has ruined a friendship just as he will go and try and ruin Rob’s marriage, his family and his community. Rob doesn’t know whether anything has happened to Alan or if he has escaped with a vast sum, possibly to America, and certainly others around Rob think this is exactly what he has done. But Cunningham isn’t happy ruining a friendship and impoverishing Rob Roy, he also continues to work for Montrose as he kills Rob’s cattle and rapes Mary. With Rob Roy reneging on the debt, his 300 acres belong to Montrose (John Hurt). 

We wouldn’t wish to get too bogged down in the intricacies of the film’s plotting, but to understand an aspect of Sharp’s interest in applying noir narration to an 18th-century tale, and to comprehend the perversity of Cunningham’s behaviour, we will say a little more about the story and how Cunningham functions within it. Cunningham would seem to have no reason to make Rob Roy’s life any more difficult than pragmatism demands but it is as though he sees in McGregor an honour he wishes to break, though this would initially be a claim the film makes rather than Cunningham insists upon. In scenes that immediately follow each other, Cunningham goes in to see Montrose and gets lectured about his spendthrift ways and impoverishment, with Cunningham sycophantic and two-faced as he offers Montrose a smile that could immediately turn into a grimace. Before leaving, Montrose tells him: “Remember your place, Sir, that is all I ask of any man.” He leaves dishonoured and doesn’t see Rob Roy sitting in a chair waiting to discuss with Montrose the loan he seeks. Though Rob seeks money, he asks for it with dignity and insists that he is a man of his oath. Montrose says over a particular issue with cattle, “is that what passes for honour with a McGregor then?” Rob replies “what passes for honour with me is likely to be the same as with your lordship. When my word is given, it is good.” :"Well, you are to be congratulated on such deeply bought nobility” Montrose responds. He has the last word in the exchange but we also notice that as Montrose appears to win this verbal duel, McGregor looks at Montrose with a gaze that seems to disconcert the Lord, and the latter agrees to draw up papers. 

It may appear a failing that the film doesn’t make clear there is animosity between Cunningham and Roy Roy until almost an hour into the film but this is where a film’s non-diegetic meaning needn’t weaken character but strengthen theme. It can give to the work a nuance beyond the schematic and narratively deliberate. If what interested Sharp was, in his own words, “moral ambiguity, mixed motives, irony and sex” (Film Comment), we can see how they all come together across the two scenes mentioned and also one that precedes them and another after them. In the first of the four scenes, Rob Roy tells his children that “honour is what no man give you, and none can take away. Honour is a man’s gift to himself.” In the fourth scene, Rob is in a tavern drawing up the contract with Killearn and a boy comes over and asks if is Rob Roy and Killearn says, seeing Rob is much loved, “even the servant boys know who you are.” What we have is a picture of Rob as admirable and an image of Cunningham where he is not. If even the servant boys know of Rob and his decency, there is a good chance Archie knows exactly who he is as well, and might have heard of Rob’s skill with a sword but even more of the sort of honour Cunningham clearly does not possess. This is a point that will incorporate the broader narrative when Rob Roy accepts that the child in Mary’s womb may not be his own but Cunningham’s. Yet Rob will nevertheless acknowledge it as his child, while Cunningham rejects the child he is responsible for in the maid’s womb and says she just needs to “root it out: if Killearn does not know an old crone with a twig, I miss my guess.” 

But obviously, later, there is also the moment when Rob Roy holds a knife at Cunningham’s throat and, after, pushes him to the ground. This comes far too late in the film to pass for an inciting incident, far too late if we accept “the inciting incident of a story is the event that sets the main character or characters on the journey that will occupy them throughout the narrative” even if does “…upset the balance within the main character’s world.” (Masterclass) Rob is now a fugitive and cannot return to his wife and children. However, if we view the film not as a carefully crafted work of plot but a more intricately weaved tale of what in Gaelic is called clu (which can translate as honour or name), then Cunningham needn’t be simply the villain of the story, but more the least honourable figure in it, just as Rob Roy is the most given to value the importance of decency, obligation and living up to one’s word. In the scene where Rob pushes Cunningham to the ground, the Marquess of Montrose has tried to persuade Rob Roy to speak ill of the Duke of Argyll, who Montrose claims is a Jacobite and would be happy if the Stuarts returned to the throne. Rob Boy is a Jacobite and has no great fondness for Argyll, but he has no interest in perjuring a man he has no reason to traduce, and says, “what you have asked is as below me as it should be beneath your lordship.” Montrose asks Cunningham to arrest him but Rob pulls out his own Sgian Dubh and holds it to Archibald’s throat before yanking Cunningham’s sword from its scabbard and then pushing him to the ground. It is a humiliating moment indeed, and reason enough for the thin-skinned Cunningham to seek revenge, but that isn’t quite how the film presents it. What matters more is the broadest possible delineation of honour rather than the specifics of a clash. While the animosity between Rob Roy and Cunningham is important, it needn’t be the incident that sets the film in motion early on. 

The film’s emphasis on the nuance of circumstances over the demands of action is never more pronounced than in how the film deals with Mary’s rape by Cunningham. It comes after Rob has fled to the hills and Cunningham and a horde of redcoats arrive, killing the family’s cattle, burning the house and of course defiling Mary. Mary keeps the rape to herself, aware that if Rob finds out he will seek revenge, coming out of hiding and making himself easily captured. In both Cunningham’s humiliation and Mary’s rape, the film offers strong opportunities for plot acceleration, but in the former instance Sharp allows the scene to take place almost an hour into the film, and in the latter, Rob Roy doesn’t find out about what happened to Mary until around the 100th minute — and it is only a little later when he finds out too that Mary is pregnant with a child whose father could well be Cunningham. Mary says she couldn’t kill the child, and Rob Roy says “It isn’t the child that needs killing” as he challenges Cunningham to a duel through the Duke of Argyll. 

It provides the film with the showdown, and one of the scenes that obviously invokes the second genre Sharp is working within: the western. Throughout the film has used the serpentine narrative of noir within the honour of the western genre. If in noir often no character comes out of the film looking good, the Western is often seen by critics as potentially the most binary of genres: the one where good and bad are clearly defined rather than muddily mixed. The revisionist westerns of the seventies wished to complicate some of these assumptions, including Ulzana’s Raid, which was so savagely determined to dissolve the categories that the liberal in the film is presented troublesomely, while The Hired Hand invokes but doesn’t quite allow for the noir triangle, with wife, husband and best friend. Partly what makes Rob Roy so interesting is that it insists on great motivational complexity without insisting on ethical complexity. Whatever Rob and Mary and the Duke of Argyll do they do out of decency and whatever Cunningham, Killearn and Montrose do stems from self-interest and cruelty. The film’s morality without its motivational convolutions would have left the film as simple-minded as its rival Braveheart. Sharp, however, proposes that to retain the value of the good means understanding the motives of the low, to see that wisdom may seem like an innate comprehension but it is constantly tested by those who reckon status matters far more than decency, as we see that honour can manifest itself as an elaborate hierarchy or retention of self-dignity. As Montrose says to Rob: To know one’s place MacGregor in the order of things is a great blessing.” However, that is a hierarchical value, not a self-dignifying one. 

If one sees the western at work it rests vitally on a Manichean world, with its humble homesteaders, its bullying expansionists and the necessity of a duel that will help resolve the tensions. In this sense, like many a western, Rob Roy it is a static film: Rob Roy wants to retain what he has even if an aspect of the plot rests on what can seem like an act of ambition. When Rob goes to Montrose and borrows the thousand pounds, the latter says, “a man of property intent on growing richer. Well, we have more in common than I would have expected MacGregor.” But while for Montrose this is to keep expanding the vast comfort that we see later in the film when Rob escapes from his enormous and well-kept grounds, for Rob Roy it seems more a communal need, a way of building the community without relying on the wealth of the Dukes who own much of the land. In one scene we see him explaining to his fellow people the details of the loan, and shortly after, we see everyone enjoying a celebration suggesting all will partake in this profit-making venture. One might view such a contrast as too heavy, but if we accept that like many a western, the film wishes to find the dignity of human worth, then it accepts this depends on the values particular characters espouse. It is partly why near the end of the film, MacGregor can contritely say he was too pig-headed to look after his family over wrongly refusing to give Montrose what he was looking for: saying that Argyll was a Jacobite. But Mary says he wasn’t wrong; that the rape she insists was not a wrong past bearing because there was a value greater than the deed which needed protection. It isn’t so much that Rob Roy has retained his dignity but that the value of dignity itself has value and must be contained within individuals. Mary and Rob are such people. Despite events; they have transcended them and held on to their dignity, a value everyone should be able to possess as we might think back to the pep talk Rob gives his children. 

Robert B. Pippin, talking about the western genre, speaks of Stagecoach and says: “[John] Ford’s film is a compelling visual alternative, a picture of an aspiration to equality that Tocqueville did not seem to understand well — a claim to moral equality, the equal dignity and worth, the ‘inestimable’ value of each individual as such, as Kant put it, following Rouseau.” (Hollywood Westerns and American Myth) Rob Roy has a primitive morality in the eyes of those with wealth but we are more inclined to see that a moral system is only as good as its universal application. While Montrose sees the fundamental value resting on knowing one’s place in a hierarchy, MacGregor reckons it resides in an innate decency that can only be removed, not given. Gilles Deleuze, lecturing on Rousseau, notes that “property has created a sentiment of justice, but its voice is still feeble. Despite this sentiment, the individual man is going to define himself as an owner, more or less greedy, in discovering interests of ownership in the inequality of properties due to the division of labor.” (Deleuze Seminars) It is such a position Rousseau rejects and Rob Roy would be inclined to agree with him, no matter if Montrose sees in the borrowed money a man who wants to expand his wealth. It is more, it seems that MacGregor wants to protect his clansfolk from the expansionist wealth Montrose and others insist upon. Thinking of both Pippin and Deleuze’s remarks, Rob Roy demands moral equality, one that shouldn’t be based on the exploitation of others but their emancipation.   

This might seem like an obvious claim were it not for the evidence all around us that shows morality, like history, is usually written by the winners. The laws are not written by the poor and as Deleuze notes, “there follows an evolution of the moral being towards a morality of justice, after just the idea of property which is the base of the development of the moral being. This justice consists in giving everyone what they are due.” (Deleuze Seminars) For Montrose what someone is due is based on what they already have, which isn’t necessarily to decry him as an amoral man, but to view him chiefly as what we would now call a businessman. He wants a decent rate of interest and if Rob reneges on the deal Montrose gets his land. But he is willing to lend, and he isn’t involved in the thieving plans of Cunningham and Killearn. While by any standards Cunningham and Killearn are villainous, Montrose is simply someone who is taking full advantage of a system that rewards him within the realm of laws that are in his interest but that he nevertheless abides by. The film may couch him as a villain but ironically this is where Sharp and Caton-Jones’ politics are most pronounced. If Killearn and Cunningham act terribly as they transcend justice and thieve and kill, Montrose acts within the justice system when he seizes MacGregor’s property after the 1,000 goes missing. The film may imply that Montrose’s wealth is exorbitant, his gardens enormous and his servants and gardeners innumerable, but that is what the Crown believes acceptable within the Union — the Duke of Montrose was the title given to James Graham for his contribution to the Act of Union in 1707, only six years before the film’s story. Even when Montrose asks Rob to claim that Argyll has Jacobite sympathies, this needn’t be seen a terrible request if we reckon that protecting the stability of this new union is a priority. Who wouldn’t wish to root out those determined to undermine it? But Montrose is also very far away from the values Rob Roy insists upon, ones Pippin sees in Ford’s film, and believes is vital to Rousseau and Kant. If we can say that Rob Roy is a noir and a western it rests partly on seeing the egoistic and materialist machinations of the former and the dignity of protecting one’s values and one’s land in the latter. If one sees, too, that Rob and the other good characters are static in their beliefs, it lies in the film viewing them as innately good. Why would they be active? Their purpose is to resist the actively troublesome values of others, whether authoritatively endorsed (Montrose) or illegally pursued (Cunningham and Killearn).

Yet for all its generic acknowledgement, for all its ethical complexity within its assertive moral position, the film audio-visually is very much a Scottish work. It may use the Coen Brothers’ composer Carter Burwell, but it is as though this American musician who often offers facetious scores for the Coens, has taken more seriously Scotland than the US, or at least saw in the attention to the hills and lochs a seriousness he couldn’t quite avoid. “A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly”, Bergson proposed, but “it will never be laughable.” (Laughter) Burwell reckoned: “The film is unlike anything I'd done before, in that it's a romantic epic with virtually no sense of irony about it, and that was the most difficult aspect of the project from my point of view. I prefer a life in which we don't take ourselves too seriously, and the film rather does the opposite.” (Sountrack.Net) By ignoring the ironic is to allow the risk of the sentimental but Caton-Jones instead seeks the romantic, seeing in the hills and glens, the tartan and the lochs an idyllic world that is only detestable for those who cannot comprehend its natural beauty and instead seek from it extractive and exploitative possibilities. 

   It is why Cunningham can say “this country does not agree with me. I can’t wait to be out of the damnable place.” “The sentiments of a great many of us”, Killearn adds, though we might wonder whether he agrees that Scotland is awful (though he is a Scot himself), or whether he would be glad to see the back of Cunningham. Cunningham is moved to offer the remark after Killearn tells him various tradespeople are seeking cash for the items they have made for him, and Archibald probably sees it as some sort of affront that the lowly can come chasing him for money. He might also wonder if there has been much point in spending small fortunes on larger-than-life clothing if there isn’t much of a court to admire his attire. In contrast, for MacGregor, the colours he wears aren’t contrary to the country he lives in but more than consistent with it. Cunningham is determined to stand out in bold couture that emphasises the courtly 18th-century coat, waistcoat and breeches, in a variety of colours and much embroidered. Whether it is the beige coat before the swordfight early in the film, the salmon-toned one he wears while he stands behind Montrose as the latter plays cards, or dressed as a redcoat in various scenes but looking still every stitched inch a dandy, Cunningham remains conspicuous in the environment he reluctantly exists within. Rob’s colours are so consistent they could pass for camouflage: when Rob Roy, Mary and the kids are viewed walking towards the camera while they are out on the hills, they blend in well with the landscape, with their colours of beige, brown and green. Later when Rob Rob and his clan are hiding after Rob becomes a fugitive, we see contrasting images of Rob and others mingling with the environment, and the redcoats standing out as they go after MacGregor’s property. It makes horrible sense that Cunningham would rape Mary hoping that she would tell Rob what has happened so that Rob would come out of hiding: Montrose’s men would be unlikely to find him in an environment he knows so well and where the clothing he wears always blends in with it. Burwell’s music captures the un-ironic images the film seeks, as though it needs to reflect both the pragmatism of people who live so close to the land that they could physically blend in with it, and the romantic need to see it as a place that reflects their soul. When Rob offers the remarks about dignity, it comes just after the family reaches the top of the hill and the film offers a long shot as we see in the distance Rob leaning against a large stone. At the end of the scene, as the kids are away tending to the animals, and Mary and Rob make love, the camera rises up behind the stone and retreats before dissolving into the face of Montrose, as he starts to give Cunningham a dressing down about the money he has spent on dressing up. There is no need for Rob and Mary to spend fortunes on clothes; they need only the simpler items that will allow for such harmony. The landscape may be a romantic backdrop but it is also a place the characters very much occupy. Rob wouldn’t be inclined to call Scotland a damnable place, and Burwell’s soundtrack (which isn’t afraid to use bagpipes for the film’s darker moments) generally reflects the joy of the hills and glens. 

Yet the film is Romantic too if we see Rousseau both as the father of Romanticism and view Rob Roy as amongst those who could be deemed the fathers of Rousseauism, at least in Sharp’s carnation. Peter France says that Rousseau’s ‘Two Discourses’ “created a lasting image of Rousseau the eloquent enemy of polite society and defender of more primitive ways, the Diogenes of our time. This is how he was most often seen, admired, imitated, and refuted in England and equally in Scotland.” France also notes: “The Highlands struck visitors from the South as a truly barbarous country. In Johnson's and Boswell's accounts of their Scottish journey of 1773 there are frequent comparisons between the Highlanders and the savages of North America…” ('Primitivism and Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Scots') Let us not try too hard to draw links between a rebel outlaw and a French philosopher, and not get into the intricacies of Rousseau’s perspective on savagery, but Sharp offers a Rousseausque relationship with self based on primal instincts rather than deliberate poise. This is never more pronounced than in the sword fight that concludes the film and allows for the equivalent of the western showdown. Rob is not the better swordsman and finally wins through his ability to receive pain rather than inflict it. That doesn’t make Rob a masochist but it does indicate he is a man of fortitude, someone whose demanding existence has probably made suffering a natural consequence of living simply. When it looks like he will surely lose the fight with Cunningham after Cunningham cuts Rob several times with his lighter, rapier blade, Rob is on his knees, exhausted, his broadsword beside him, and with the younger man’s blade at his throat. He grabs the blade and goes for his own, all but slicing Cunningham in two. It is a ‘primitive’ reaction to a superior swordsman’s skill but the film doesn’t at all see it as a failure on Rob’s part. He isn’t fighting Cunningham to prove the better swordsman; he is fighting him because he wants Cunningham to have nothing to do with the child in Mary’s womb: it is the possible father who needs to be deprived of life not the child in her body. While Cunningham fights for money and repute as he has earlier done against the bruiser Guthrie, Rob seeks to avoid useless trouble. When Guthrie confronts him in a tavern, Rob reluctantly agrees to the duel and says whoever draws first blood wins, promptly allowing his hand to brush up against Guthrie’s drawn blade and thus bleeds. The fight is over and everyone laughs and jeers at Guthrie’s humiliation. 

But fighting Cunningham is necessary trouble. Though the odds are poor enough for Argyll to forego waging on Rob to win, win he does, not only because the film wants its happy ending but also because Rob has everything to lose and Cunningham just another small victory as he would once again be seen as a very fine swordsman. There is nothing that sits behind Cunningham but his pride and prowess. For Rob there is his family, his clan, his country and honour far greater than an individual’s ego. In a more egoistically oriented work, Rob would have to win well while actually he wins badly, as though the unfairness Cunningham has shown in every other aspect of his life deserves a defeat in the one area where he plays by the rules. There is in the moment, when Rob cuts Cunningham all but in half, a deep groan and grunt that suggests Rob is fighting from an instinct far removed from the court duel. We might note that in a scene that has minimised cutaways to others watching, offers a reaction shot to Montrose’s face after the blade cuts into Cunningham’s body. The expression resembles a little the one we have noted much earlier in the film when MacGregor borrows money from Montrose and Montrose's comment about Rob’s so-cheaply-bought nobility. Montrose offers it as though he has won the debate, and rather than replying, Rob gives Montrose a steely glare that becomes manifest in the steel of the blade after he takes out Montrose’s prize possession. 

The look on Montrose’s face in both instances might make us think that if this is a man comfortably ensconced by the Queen for his hand in securing the Union, then maybe he doesn’t sleep so well at night for fear of a Jacobite rebellion which would have, amongst others, Rob Roy MacGregor fighting for the cause. Here we have the duel that is vital to many a western but it is embedded within a Scottish history showing Tartanry incorporated within the sort of American genres Sharp mastered, and given a perspective that too many initially ignored in their determination to see cliche and stereotype. When in a short piece in the Guardian, historian Alex von Tunzelmann, says “hairy, sturdy-thighed Highlanders swarm manfully through the glens, hunting cattle thieves”, she also notes that “the baddies are English and queer, the goodies are Scottish and ruggedly hetero. And by "Scottish", the film means “American”." Tunzelmann adds, “there's even an irrelevant subplot about one of Rob Roy's men wanting to emigrate to America. This would appear to be little more than an embarrassing attempt to beguile Hank and Barbara McDonald of Wichita, Kansas into believing that Rob Roy is about them.” Put aside the historian’s inaccuracies and exaggerations that may make us wonder if she can’t get facts right when they are in front of her on the screen, as we will see, then it is unlikely to instil confidence in her getting facts right from centuries earlier. She also misses the point that Sharp (who goes unmentioned in the piece) not only had been working in the States for many years, but also very deliberately invokes the Western. Tunzelmann reckons that the film is simplistic because it isn’t fair to history. “As far as this film is concerned, though, context is a snore. The events shown, where real, span approximately the years 1712 to 1722, yet the uprisings of 1715 and 1719 are nowhere to be seen.” But the film is very clearly set in 1713 and the events cover at most a matter of months. The film is truer to Aristotle than it is to history, determined to create a necessary conflation all the better to keep unity of time and space. 

It may also have had an eye on the box-office, aware that the intricacies of history could undermine the engagement of a broad audience. Yet it wasn’t only that the producers understandably wanted international viewers for a film that cost $28m (Trainspotting cost around $2m). It was also that Sharp knew how to write a film that could utilise the Scottish environment while invigorating potential cliche, aware perhaps that by seeing Rob Roy as a western hero, and Montrose and especially Cunningham and Killearn as noirish figures, he could access the complexity of noir plotting with the simplicity of western iconographic dignity, and align them to images of Scotland that had understandably been much criticised for their touristic simplicity. But historians like Tunzelmann simplify things far more, refusing to comprehend the aesthetic needs of a work whose purpose is to generate nuance in the art rather than accuracy in its history. If Rob Roy is in its way an important film, it rests on the contribution it makes to Scottish representation rather than to Scotland's historic record. It gives to Tartanry a generic substance by intermingling two genres, one of which might not be entirely alien to Scotland (evident in the popularity of Tartan noir) but that usually isn’t likely to be matched with Tartanry and the western Manichaean conflict. At the Scottish parliament opening in 1999 Sheena Wellington sang Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’. But what if the parliament chose also to screen a film? There would have been a few to choose from if it wished to offer optimism without cliche, the romantic without the indulgent, including Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero. But if it wanted a historical epic, and wished to distance itself from the initial enthusiasm Alex Salmond showed towards Braveheart, Rob Roy would have been an honourable choice.                            

 

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Rob Roy

Giving Texture to Tartanry

It isn’t easy to imagine that a part of the country known for its unrest, for being seen within the wider nation as terroristic, would go on to become an acceptable, even foremost, part of the United Kingdom's identity. But that is exactly what happened to the Highlands and the clan system as the kilt and its accoutrements became first banned, and then later reintroduced quite deliberately. In 1746, the British government brought in the Dress Act: “From and after the first day of August, one thousand seven hundred and forty seven, no Man or Boy, within that part of Great Britain called Scotland, other than such as shall be employed as Officers and Soldiers in His Majesty's Forces, shall, on any pretence whatsoever wear or put on the Clothes commonly called Highland Clothes (that is to say) the Plaid, Philabeg, or little Kilt, Trowse, Shoulder Belts, or any part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland Garb; and that no Tartan, or party-coloured Plaid or Stuff shall be used for Great Coats, or for Upper Coats.” (Scottish Tartans Authority) Just over thirty years later, the Highland Society in London’s “avowed intention was the preservation of the law forbidding the wearing of the Highland dress in Scotland” (The Scottish Nation) before the law was changed in 1782. By 1822, the wearing of plaid was not only acceptable, it became normalised. As Tom Devine says, “the apotheosis of this transformation came in 1822 with the remarkable celebration of the visit of George IV to Edinburgh…He was the first monarch to set foot in Scotland since Charles II in 1651.” Devine tells us that the “king spent two weeks in the Scottish capital and a series of extraordinary pageants, all with a Celtic and Highland flavour, were stage-managed by Sir Walter Scott for his delectation. What ensued was a ‘plaided panorama’ based on fake Highland regalia and the mythical customs and traditions of the clans.” (The Scottish Nation) 

   If a century earlier the Union was in a state of constant fret over a Jacobite rebellion, in the early 19th century we had the Jacobite image co-opted into a safe, Hanovarian notion of the Highlands. And behind this image was of course Walter Scott, a writer whose enormous reputation during the 19th century became a problematic one for much of the 20th. As Cairns Craig notes, “The disparagement of Walter Scott's 'romantic' Scotland rose in an intensifying crescendo in the years after the Second World War, culminating in Robin Jenkins's Fergus Lamont in 1978 - in which the protagonist declares that it was his ambition to be like Walter Scott, to 'write about common people and consort with nobility’ — and in Murray and Barbara Grigor's 'Scotch Myths' exhibition of 1981, which presented the history of Scotland's representation in the kitsch of postcards and shortbread tins.” (‘Constituting Scotland’)

This has led to a disparaging of all things that fall under Tartanry, to assume as a default position that anything which suggests plaid, rolling hills and lilting music should be viewed with at least suspicion. Emily Torricelli says the Pixar film “Brave…in this respect... has much in common with other films such as Highlander and Rob Roy that construct Scotland as a fantasy or historical space.” (‘Digital Places, Feminine Spaces: Scotland Re-gendered in Twenty-first Century Film’) Robert A. Morace says while speaking favourably of Trainspotting the film that it came out between “two especially bloody hymns to Scottish manhood, Rob Roy, and the even more egregious and insidious) Braveheart.” (Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting) Here the assumption is that Tartanry is bad and any film interested in engaging with this view of Scotland must be seen negatively. But it seems to us that though Braveheart (and Brave and Highlander) and Rob Roy exist in ostensibly the same world, there is a world of a difference between them: that Rob Roy if looked at closely enough deconstructs and reconstitutes Tartanry just as Local Hero, for example, interrogated the assumptions behind kailyard, behind the idea of Scotland as a place of quaint villages and loveable folk. 

But before defending the film let us accept this is a Hollywood production no matter if it was written and directed by Scotsmen: Alan Sharp and Michael Caton-Jones. It was produced by MGM/UA, had a German cinematographer who would go on to shoot Independence Day, the Coen brothers’ composer Carter Burwell, and a cast that includes the Irish Liam Neeson as Rob Roy McGregor, the American Jessica Lange as his wife Mary, and the American Eric Stoltz has his best friend. Hardly a home-grown production, but what Sharp gives to the film is an American generic sensibility all the better to give texture to Tartanry. Sharp does so by utilising the genres he worked within when working Stateside: the Western (Ulzana’s Raid; The Hired Hand) and the film noir (The Last Run; Night Moves), showing an interest in the showdown and the land evident in the former, and the serpentine relationship with motive in the latter. Critics may have played up an effeminacy of the film’s villain Archibald Cunningham (Tim Roth), seeing in the role negative stereotypes of homosexuality, with James R. Keller saying “a substantial part of the dialogue and imagery is committed to maintaining the association between Archie and same-sex practices” (‘Masculinity and Marginality in Rob Roy’). But what matters chiefly is the complexity of Archibald’s machinations. He is a man who thinks ahead not only for his own gain but for the maximum amount of displeasure to others, as though it isn’t that Archibald has homosexual inclinations (though he may) but that he has properly perverse ones that go far beyond the parameters of given sexuality, however apparently dissident. If a gay man may merely be seeking a particular pleasure that is deemed unacceptable in a given culture, the perversity of the position is a societal problem much more than an individual one — changes to the society allow a person deemed a pervert to become an acceptable member of that society without any need to change their behaviour. The homosexual is ‘merely’ a pervert but that perversity is society’s problem not his. When society changes the ‘problem’ goes away. To claim Archibald as a gay man and to see the film presenting him negatively, is to say almost nothing about his character and about the film. Archibald is much more perverse than ‘pervert’, someone for whom societal acceptance would be unlikely to alter the sort of games he insists on playing as he relishes making other people’s lives a misery.  

In the film, Archibald is apparently in Scotland escaping debts and making money for the Lord (Montrose) he is staying with by getting into and winning wagers on sword fights that his odious behaviour instigates and that his brilliance with a blade allows him to win. A conventionally motivated character would be happy enough trying to pay off his debts this way and, finding that he can’t, cook up another plan to do so. This is exactly what he does when Rob Roy borrows a £1,000 from Montrose, intending to make a good profit by buying cattle in Crieff and taking it down to Carlisle where the price is much higher. Archie has other ideas and involves Melrose’s factor, Killearn (Brian Cox), who, rather than giving Rob Roy’s friend Alan McDonald (Stoltz) a promissory note, offers instead cash. Melrose is off in Edinburgh and then continuing on to London and hasn’t signed the note. McDonald needs the money now, reluctantly accepts cash and when on his travels, McDonald gets stopped by Cunningham, who takes the money and kills him. Cunningham hasn’t just gone off with the cash, he will also be well aware that he has ruined a friendship just as he will go and try and ruin Rob’s marriage, his family and his community. Rob doesn’t know whether anything has happened to Alan or if he has escaped with a vast sum, possibly to America, and certainly others around Rob think this is exactly what he has done. But Cunningham isn’t happy ruining a friendship and impoverishing Rob Roy, he also continues to work for Montrose as he kills Rob’s cattle and rapes Mary. With Rob Roy reneging on the debt, his 300 acres belong to Montrose (John Hurt). 

We wouldn’t wish to get too bogged down in the intricacies of the film’s plotting, but to understand an aspect of Sharp’s interest in applying noir narration to an 18th-century tale, and to comprehend the perversity of Cunningham’s behaviour, we will say a little more about the story and how Cunningham functions within it. Cunningham would seem to have no reason to make Rob Roy’s life any more difficult than pragmatism demands but it is as though he sees in McGregor an honour he wishes to break, though this would initially be a claim the film makes rather than Cunningham insists upon. In scenes that immediately follow each other, Cunningham goes in to see Montrose and gets lectured about his spendthrift ways and impoverishment, with Cunningham sycophantic and two-faced as he offers Montrose a smile that could immediately turn into a grimace. Before leaving, Montrose tells him: “Remember your place, Sir, that is all I ask of any man.” He leaves dishonoured and doesn’t see Rob Roy sitting in a chair waiting to discuss with Montrose the loan he seeks. Though Rob seeks money, he asks for it with dignity and insists that he is a man of his oath. Montrose says over a particular issue with cattle, “is that what passes for honour with a McGregor then?” Rob replies “what passes for honour with me is likely to be the same as with your lordship. When my word is given, it is good.” :"Well, you are to be congratulated on such deeply bought nobility” Montrose responds. He has the last word in the exchange but we also notice that as Montrose appears to win this verbal duel, McGregor looks at Montrose with a gaze that seems to disconcert the Lord, and the latter agrees to draw up papers. 

It may appear a failing that the film doesn’t make clear there is animosity between Cunningham and Roy Roy until almost an hour into the film but this is where a film’s non-diegetic meaning needn’t weaken character but strengthen theme. It can give to the work a nuance beyond the schematic and narratively deliberate. If what interested Sharp was, in his own words, “moral ambiguity, mixed motives, irony and sex” (Film Comment), we can see how they all come together across the two scenes mentioned and also one that precedes them and another after them. In the first of the four scenes, Rob Roy tells his children that “honour is what no man give you, and none can take away. Honour is a man’s gift to himself.” In the fourth scene, Rob is in a tavern drawing up the contract with Killearn and a boy comes over and asks if is Rob Roy and Killearn says, seeing Rob is much loved, “even the servant boys know who you are.” What we have is a picture of Rob as admirable and an image of Cunningham where he is not. If even the servant boys know of Rob and his decency, there is a good chance Archie knows exactly who he is as well, and might have heard of Rob’s skill with a sword but even more of the sort of honour Cunningham clearly does not possess. This is a point that will incorporate the broader narrative when Rob Roy accepts that the child in Mary’s womb may not be his own but Cunningham’s. Yet Rob will nevertheless acknowledge it as his child, while Cunningham rejects the child he is responsible for in the maid’s womb and says she just needs to “root it out: if Killearn does not know an old crone with a twig, I miss my guess.” 

But obviously, later, there is also the moment when Rob Roy holds a knife at Cunningham’s throat and, after, pushes him to the ground. This comes far too late in the film to pass for an inciting incident, far too late if we accept “the inciting incident of a story is the event that sets the main character or characters on the journey that will occupy them throughout the narrative” even if does “…upset the balance within the main character’s world.” (Masterclass) Rob is now a fugitive and cannot return to his wife and children. However, if we view the film not as a carefully crafted work of plot but a more intricately weaved tale of what in Gaelic is called clu (which can translate as honour or name), then Cunningham needn’t be simply the villain of the story, but more the least honourable figure in it, just as Rob Roy is the most given to value the importance of decency, obligation and living up to one’s word. In the scene where Rob pushes Cunningham to the ground, the Marquess of Montrose has tried to persuade Rob Roy to speak ill of the Duke of Argyll, who Montrose claims is a Jacobite and would be happy if the Stuarts returned to the throne. Rob Boy is a Jacobite and has no great fondness for Argyll, but he has no interest in perjuring a man he has no reason to traduce, and says, “what you have asked is as below me as it should be beneath your lordship.” Montrose asks Cunningham to arrest him but Rob pulls out his own Sgian Dubh and holds it to Archibald’s throat before yanking Cunningham’s sword from its scabbard and then pushing him to the ground. It is a humiliating moment indeed, and reason enough for the thin-skinned Cunningham to seek revenge, but that isn’t quite how the film presents it. What matters more is the broadest possible delineation of honour rather than the specifics of a clash. While the animosity between Rob Roy and Cunningham is important, it needn’t be the incident that sets the film in motion early on. 

The film’s emphasis on the nuance of circumstances over the demands of action is never more pronounced than in how the film deals with Mary’s rape by Cunningham. It comes after Rob has fled to the hills and Cunningham and a horde of redcoats arrive, killing the family’s cattle, burning the house and of course defiling Mary. Mary keeps the rape to herself, aware that if Rob finds out he will seek revenge, coming out of hiding and making himself easily captured. In both Cunningham’s humiliation and Mary’s rape, the film offers strong opportunities for plot acceleration, but in the former instance Sharp allows the scene to take place almost an hour into the film, and in the latter, Rob Roy doesn’t find out about what happened to Mary until around the 100th minute — and it is only a little later when he finds out too that Mary is pregnant with a child whose father could well be Cunningham. Mary says she couldn’t kill the child, and Rob Roy says “It isn’t the child that needs killing” as he challenges Cunningham to a duel through the Duke of Argyll. 

It provides the film with the showdown, and one of the scenes that obviously invokes the second genre Sharp is working within: the western. Throughout the film has used the serpentine narrative of noir within the honour of the western genre. If in noir often no character comes out of the film looking good, the Western is often seen by critics as potentially the most binary of genres: the one where good and bad are clearly defined rather than muddily mixed. The revisionist westerns of the seventies wished to complicate some of these assumptions, including Ulzana’s Raid, which was so savagely determined to dissolve the categories that the liberal in the film is presented troublesomely, while The Hired Hand invokes but doesn’t quite allow for the noir triangle, with wife, husband and best friend. Partly what makes Rob Roy so interesting is that it insists on great motivational complexity without insisting on ethical complexity. Whatever Rob and Mary and the Duke of Argyll do they do out of decency and whatever Cunningham, Killearn and Montrose do stems from self-interest and cruelty. The film’s morality without its motivational convolutions would have left the film as simple-minded as its rival Braveheart. Sharp, however, proposes that to retain the value of the good means understanding the motives of the low, to see that wisdom may seem like an innate comprehension but it is constantly tested by those who reckon status matters far more than decency, as we see that honour can manifest itself as an elaborate hierarchy or retention of self-dignity. As Montrose says to Rob: To know one’s place MacGregor in the order of things is a great blessing.” However, that is a hierarchical value, not a self-dignifying one. 

If one sees the western at work it rests vitally on a Manichean world, with its humble homesteaders, its bullying expansionists and the necessity of a duel that will help resolve the tensions. In this sense, like many a western, Rob Roy it is a static film: Rob Roy wants to retain what he has even if an aspect of the plot rests on what can seem like an act of ambition. When Rob goes to Montrose and borrows the thousand pounds, the latter says, “a man of property intent on growing richer. Well, we have more in common than I would have expected MacGregor.” But while for Montrose this is to keep expanding the vast comfort that we see later in the film when Rob escapes from his enormous and well-kept grounds, for Rob Roy it seems more a communal need, a way of building the community without relying on the wealth of the Dukes who own much of the land. In one scene we see him explaining to his fellow people the details of the loan, and shortly after, we see everyone enjoying a celebration suggesting all will partake in this profit-making venture. One might view such a contrast as too heavy, but if we accept that like many a western, the film wishes to find the dignity of human worth, then it accepts this depends on the values particular characters espouse. It is partly why near the end of the film, MacGregor can contritely say he was too pig-headed to look after his family over wrongly refusing to give Montrose what he was looking for: saying that Argyll was a Jacobite. But Mary says he wasn’t wrong; that the rape she insists was not a wrong past bearing because there was a value greater than the deed which needed protection. It isn’t so much that Rob Roy has retained his dignity but that the value of dignity itself has value and must be contained within individuals. Mary and Rob are such people. Despite events; they have transcended them and held on to their dignity, a value everyone should be able to possess as we might think back to the pep talk Rob gives his children. 

Robert B. Pippin, talking about the western genre, speaks of Stagecoach and says: “[John] Ford’s film is a compelling visual alternative, a picture of an aspiration to equality that Tocqueville did not seem to understand well — a claim to moral equality, the equal dignity and worth, the ‘inestimable’ value of each individual as such, as Kant put it, following Rouseau.” (Hollywood Westerns and American Myth) Rob Roy has a primitive morality in the eyes of those with wealth but we are more inclined to see that a moral system is only as good as its universal application. While Montrose sees the fundamental value resting on knowing one’s place in a hierarchy, MacGregor reckons it resides in an innate decency that can only be removed, not given. Gilles Deleuze, lecturing on Rousseau, notes that “property has created a sentiment of justice, but its voice is still feeble. Despite this sentiment, the individual man is going to define himself as an owner, more or less greedy, in discovering interests of ownership in the inequality of properties due to the division of labor.” (Deleuze Seminars) It is such a position Rousseau rejects and Rob Roy would be inclined to agree with him, no matter if Montrose sees in the borrowed money a man who wants to expand his wealth. It is more, it seems that MacGregor wants to protect his clansfolk from the expansionist wealth Montrose and others insist upon. Thinking of both Pippin and Deleuze’s remarks, Rob Roy demands moral equality, one that shouldn’t be based on the exploitation of others but their emancipation.   

This might seem like an obvious claim were it not for the evidence all around us that shows morality, like history, is usually written by the winners. The laws are not written by the poor and as Deleuze notes, “there follows an evolution of the moral being towards a morality of justice, after just the idea of property which is the base of the development of the moral being. This justice consists in giving everyone what they are due.” (Deleuze Seminars) For Montrose what someone is due is based on what they already have, which isn’t necessarily to decry him as an amoral man, but to view him chiefly as what we would now call a businessman. He wants a decent rate of interest and if Rob reneges on the deal Montrose gets his land. But he is willing to lend, and he isn’t involved in the thieving plans of Cunningham and Killearn. While by any standards Cunningham and Killearn are villainous, Montrose is simply someone who is taking full advantage of a system that rewards him within the realm of laws that are in his interest but that he nevertheless abides by. The film may couch him as a villain but ironically this is where Sharp and Caton-Jones’ politics are most pronounced. If Killearn and Cunningham act terribly as they transcend justice and thieve and kill, Montrose acts within the justice system when he seizes MacGregor’s property after the 1,000 goes missing. The film may imply that Montrose’s wealth is exorbitant, his gardens enormous and his servants and gardeners innumerable, but that is what the Crown believes acceptable within the Union — the Duke of Montrose was the title given to James Graham for his contribution to the Act of Union in 1707, only six years before the film’s story. Even when Montrose asks Rob to claim that Argyll has Jacobite sympathies, this needn’t be seen a terrible request if we reckon that protecting the stability of this new union is a priority. Who wouldn’t wish to root out those determined to undermine it? But Montrose is also very far away from the values Rob Roy insists upon, ones Pippin sees in Ford’s film, and believes is vital to Rousseau and Kant. If we can say that Rob Roy is a noir and a western it rests partly on seeing the egoistic and materialist machinations of the former and the dignity of protecting one’s values and one’s land in the latter. If one sees, too, that Rob and the other good characters are static in their beliefs, it lies in the film viewing them as innately good. Why would they be active? Their purpose is to resist the actively troublesome values of others, whether authoritatively endorsed (Montrose) or illegally pursued (Cunningham and Killearn).

Yet for all its generic acknowledgement, for all its ethical complexity within its assertive moral position, the film audio-visually is very much a Scottish work. It may use the Coen Brothers’ composer Carter Burwell, but it is as though this American musician who often offers facetious scores for the Coens, has taken more seriously Scotland than the US, or at least saw in the attention to the hills and lochs a seriousness he couldn’t quite avoid. “A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly”, Bergson proposed, but “it will never be laughable.” (Laughter) Burwell reckoned: “The film is unlike anything I'd done before, in that it's a romantic epic with virtually no sense of irony about it, and that was the most difficult aspect of the project from my point of view. I prefer a life in which we don't take ourselves too seriously, and the film rather does the opposite.” (Sountrack.Net) By ignoring the ironic is to allow the risk of the sentimental but Caton-Jones instead seeks the romantic, seeing in the hills and glens, the tartan and the lochs an idyllic world that is only detestable for those who cannot comprehend its natural beauty and instead seek from it extractive and exploitative possibilities. 

   It is why Cunningham can say “this country does not agree with me. I can’t wait to be out of the damnable place.” “The sentiments of a great many of us”, Killearn adds, though we might wonder whether he agrees that Scotland is awful (though he is a Scot himself), or whether he would be glad to see the back of Cunningham. Cunningham is moved to offer the remark after Killearn tells him various tradespeople are seeking cash for the items they have made for him, and Archibald probably sees it as some sort of affront that the lowly can come chasing him for money. He might also wonder if there has been much point in spending small fortunes on larger-than-life clothing if there isn’t much of a court to admire his attire. In contrast, for MacGregor, the colours he wears aren’t contrary to the country he lives in but more than consistent with it. Cunningham is determined to stand out in bold couture that emphasises the courtly 18th-century coat, waistcoat and breeches, in a variety of colours and much embroidered. Whether it is the beige coat before the swordfight early in the film, the salmon-toned one he wears while he stands behind Montrose as the latter plays cards, or dressed as a redcoat in various scenes but looking still every stitched inch a dandy, Cunningham remains conspicuous in the environment he reluctantly exists within. Rob’s colours are so consistent they could pass for camouflage: when Rob Roy, Mary and the kids are viewed walking towards the camera while they are out on the hills, they blend in well with the landscape, with their colours of beige, brown and green. Later when Rob Rob and his clan are hiding after Rob becomes a fugitive, we see contrasting images of Rob and others mingling with the environment, and the redcoats standing out as they go after MacGregor’s property. It makes horrible sense that Cunningham would rape Mary hoping that she would tell Rob what has happened so that Rob would come out of hiding: Montrose’s men would be unlikely to find him in an environment he knows so well and where the clothing he wears always blends in with it. Burwell’s music captures the un-ironic images the film seeks, as though it needs to reflect both the pragmatism of people who live so close to the land that they could physically blend in with it, and the romantic need to see it as a place that reflects their soul. When Rob offers the remarks about dignity, it comes just after the family reaches the top of the hill and the film offers a long shot as we see in the distance Rob leaning against a large stone. At the end of the scene, as the kids are away tending to the animals, and Mary and Rob make love, the camera rises up behind the stone and retreats before dissolving into the face of Montrose, as he starts to give Cunningham a dressing down about the money he has spent on dressing up. There is no need for Rob and Mary to spend fortunes on clothes; they need only the simpler items that will allow for such harmony. The landscape may be a romantic backdrop but it is also a place the characters very much occupy. Rob wouldn’t be inclined to call Scotland a damnable place, and Burwell’s soundtrack (which isn’t afraid to use bagpipes for the film’s darker moments) generally reflects the joy of the hills and glens. 

Yet the film is Romantic too if we see Rousseau both as the father of Romanticism and view Rob Roy as amongst those who could be deemed the fathers of Rousseauism, at least in Sharp’s carnation. Peter France says that Rousseau’s ‘Two Discourses’ “created a lasting image of Rousseau the eloquent enemy of polite society and defender of more primitive ways, the Diogenes of our time. This is how he was most often seen, admired, imitated, and refuted in England and equally in Scotland.” France also notes: “The Highlands struck visitors from the South as a truly barbarous country. In Johnson's and Boswell's accounts of their Scottish journey of 1773 there are frequent comparisons between the Highlanders and the savages of North America…” ('Primitivism and Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Scots') Let us not try too hard to draw links between a rebel outlaw and a French philosopher, and not get into the intricacies of Rousseau’s perspective on savagery, but Sharp offers a Rousseausque relationship with self based on primal instincts rather than deliberate poise. This is never more pronounced than in the sword fight that concludes the film and allows for the equivalent of the western showdown. Rob is not the better swordsman and finally wins through his ability to receive pain rather than inflict it. That doesn’t make Rob a masochist but it does indicate he is a man of fortitude, someone whose demanding existence has probably made suffering a natural consequence of living simply. When it looks like he will surely lose the fight with Cunningham after Cunningham cuts Rob several times with his lighter, rapier blade, Rob is on his knees, exhausted, his broadsword beside him, and with the younger man’s blade at his throat. He grabs the blade and goes for his own, all but slicing Cunningham in two. It is a ‘primitive’ reaction to a superior swordsman’s skill but the film doesn’t at all see it as a failure on Rob’s part. He isn’t fighting Cunningham to prove the better swordsman; he is fighting him because he wants Cunningham to have nothing to do with the child in Mary’s womb: it is the possible father who needs to be deprived of life not the child in her body. While Cunningham fights for money and repute as he has earlier done against the bruiser Guthrie, Rob seeks to avoid useless trouble. When Guthrie confronts him in a tavern, Rob reluctantly agrees to the duel and says whoever draws first blood wins, promptly allowing his hand to brush up against Guthrie’s drawn blade and thus bleeds. The fight is over and everyone laughs and jeers at Guthrie’s humiliation. 

But fighting Cunningham is necessary trouble. Though the odds are poor enough for Argyll to forego waging on Rob to win, win he does, not only because the film wants its happy ending but also because Rob has everything to lose and Cunningham just another small victory as he would once again be seen as a very fine swordsman. There is nothing that sits behind Cunningham but his pride and prowess. For Rob there is his family, his clan, his country and honour far greater than an individual’s ego. In a more egoistically oriented work, Rob would have to win well while actually he wins badly, as though the unfairness Cunningham has shown in every other aspect of his life deserves a defeat in the one area where he plays by the rules. There is in the moment, when Rob cuts Cunningham all but in half, a deep groan and grunt that suggests Rob is fighting from an instinct far removed from the court duel. We might note that in a scene that has minimised cutaways to others watching, offers a reaction shot to Montrose’s face after the blade cuts into Cunningham’s body. The expression resembles a little the one we have noted much earlier in the film when MacGregor borrows money from Montrose and Montrose's comment about Rob’s so-cheaply-bought nobility. Montrose offers it as though he has won the debate, and rather than replying, Rob gives Montrose a steely glare that becomes manifest in the steel of the blade after he takes out Montrose’s prize possession. 

The look on Montrose’s face in both instances might make us think that if this is a man comfortably ensconced by the Queen for his hand in securing the Union, then maybe he doesn’t sleep so well at night for fear of a Jacobite rebellion which would have, amongst others, Rob Roy MacGregor fighting for the cause. Here we have the duel that is vital to many a western but it is embedded within a Scottish history showing Tartanry incorporated within the sort of American genres Sharp mastered, and given a perspective that too many initially ignored in their determination to see cliche and stereotype. When in a short piece in the Guardian, historian Alex von Tunzelmann, says “hairy, sturdy-thighed Highlanders swarm manfully through the glens, hunting cattle thieves”, she also notes that “the baddies are English and queer, the goodies are Scottish and ruggedly hetero. And by "Scottish", the film means “American”." Tunzelmann adds, “there's even an irrelevant subplot about one of Rob Roy's men wanting to emigrate to America. This would appear to be little more than an embarrassing attempt to beguile Hank and Barbara McDonald of Wichita, Kansas into believing that Rob Roy is about them.” Put aside the historian’s inaccuracies and exaggerations that may make us wonder if she can’t get facts right when they are in front of her on the screen, as we will see, then it is unlikely to instil confidence in her getting facts right from centuries earlier. She also misses the point that Sharp (who goes unmentioned in the piece) not only had been working in the States for many years, but also very deliberately invokes the Western. Tunzelmann reckons that the film is simplistic because it isn’t fair to history. “As far as this film is concerned, though, context is a snore. The events shown, where real, span approximately the years 1712 to 1722, yet the uprisings of 1715 and 1719 are nowhere to be seen.” But the film is very clearly set in 1713 and the events cover at most a matter of months. The film is truer to Aristotle than it is to history, determined to create a necessary conflation all the better to keep unity of time and space. 

It may also have had an eye on the box-office, aware that the intricacies of history could undermine the engagement of a broad audience. Yet it wasn’t only that the producers understandably wanted international viewers for a film that cost $28m (Trainspotting cost around $2m). It was also that Sharp knew how to write a film that could utilise the Scottish environment while invigorating potential cliche, aware perhaps that by seeing Rob Roy as a western hero, and Montrose and especially Cunningham and Killearn as noirish figures, he could access the complexity of noir plotting with the simplicity of western iconographic dignity, and align them to images of Scotland that had understandably been much criticised for their touristic simplicity. But historians like Tunzelmann simplify things far more, refusing to comprehend the aesthetic needs of a work whose purpose is to generate nuance in the art rather than accuracy in its history. If Rob Roy is in its way an important film, it rests on the contribution it makes to Scottish representation rather than to Scotland's historic record. It gives to Tartanry a generic substance by intermingling two genres, one of which might not be entirely alien to Scotland (evident in the popularity of Tartan noir) but that usually isn’t likely to be matched with Tartanry and the western Manichaean conflict. At the Scottish parliament opening in 1999 Sheena Wellington sang Burns’s ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’. But what if the parliament chose also to screen a film? There would have been a few to choose from if it wished to offer optimism without cliche, the romantic without the indulgent, including Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero. But if it wanted a historical epic, and wished to distance itself from the initial enthusiasm Alex Salmond showed towards Braveheart, Rob Roy would have been an honourable choice.                            

 

 


© Tony McKibbin